US President Donald Trump said he has learned that eight Iranian women “who were going to be executed tonight” would not be killed after he appealed to Tehran to release them. Iran’s judiciary denied it and asserted that none of the women faced the death penalty.
Neither claim could immediately be verified.
“Very good news! I have just been informed that the eight women protestors who were going to be executed tonight in Iran will no longer be killed. Four will be released immediately, and four will be sentenced to one month in prison,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on April 22.
“I very much appreciate that Iran, and its leaders, respected my request, as President of the United States, and terminated the planned execution,” he wrote.
In a post a day earlier, Trump called on Iran to release eight women whom a US-based activist claimed the Iranian regime was “preparing to hang” — an assertion that could not be verified and was denied by the Iranian judiciary. He said releasing them “could be a very good start” for negotiations that had been expected this week in a bid to end the US-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s April 21 post included an X post from earlier that day in which US-based pro-Israel activist Eyal Yakoby wrote that Iran “is preparing to hang eight women” and included photographs of eight girls and women; he said earlier that one of them was 16 years old.
Yakoby did not name them, but RFE/RL’s Radio Farda determined that they are Bita Hemmati, Ghazal Ghalandari, Golnaz Naraghi, Panah Movahedi, Ensieh Nejati, Mahboubeh Shabani, Venus Hosseinnejad, and Diana Taherabadi.
Rights groups have said Hemmati has been sentenced to death in connection with large, widespread protests in January that were suppressed with a massive and deadly state crackdown.
The Iran-focused human rights group Hengaw said earlier this month that Shabani, who is 33 and was also detained during the protests, faces a charge of “waging war against God,” which “can result in the death penalty.”
A source who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject told RFE/RL that Naraghi has been out of jail since February 18. RFE/RL could not immediately confirm the status of the others and whether any of them have been sentenced to death.
Iran’s judiciary claimed that the post Trump cited was “completely false.” In a statement carried by its official news agency, Mizan, the judiciary said that “a number of the women have been released, some face charges that would, if confirmed by a court, result at most in prison sentences, and none of them have a final verdict carrying the death penalty.”
The judiciary’s claim could not be independently verified, and rights groups have documented numerous executions and harsh sentences tied to protest-related cases in Iran.
Iran has executed at least eight people in connection to the January protests.
“Hundreds of protesters are currently facing death penalty charges, with at least 30 having already been sentenced to death,” according to the Oslo-based organization Iran Human Rights.
