A 23-year-old woman, Najmeh Amini, has been sentenced to death in the Iranian city of Mashhad for insulting the Prophet in social media posts, according to Iranian newspaper Khorasan.
Ms Amini, an accounting student, is being held in Vakilabad prison in Mashhad. The charge is "sab ol-nabi", the Persian term for insulting the Prophet, according to LBC.
The ruling was issued by Branch 6 of Khorasan Razavi province's Criminal Court One, according to The Insight International, which cited Khorasan. The sentence is not final and can be appealed to the Supreme Court.
In a separate trial, Ms Amini received a sentence of 12 years, six months and one day for acting against national security and spreading propaganda. The Insight International said this ruling came from Branch 1 of Mashhad's Revolutionary Court.
Khorasan reported that cyber police monitored her online activity and arrested her in Mashhad on 3 February. The paper identified her only by her initials. Other outlets have used her full name, and the source of the name could not be traced.
The content of the posts has not been made public. No date has been given for the court ruling, other than Ms Amini's own account that she was sentenced on 16 September.
The charge was first reported by an unnamed source close to her family, who spoke to the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), according to reports by Brit Brief and SSBCrack News. The claim has not been independently confirmed.
Ms Amini described the sentence in a prison telephone call recorded on 18 September, in which she said she had been sentenced two days earlier. The call was later published. "I am an innocent girl, a young person with many hopes and dreams," she said, according to The Insight International.
In the same call, she asked people to be her voice. She has also asked human rights groups to review her case.
According to Khorasan, as relayed by LBC, Ms Amini said she wrote the posts after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. Her lawyer argued the posts were a "slip of the tongue". The judge reportedly rejected this argument.
Brit Brief reported that the judge asked why she had not insulted other people while in the same state. The full wording was not available, and the remark is attributed to Khorasan's account of the hearing.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Iran Human Rights NGO (IHRNGO), commented on the case, according to LBC. "Sentencing a 23-year-old woman to death for what she expressed on social media is an extremely alarming development," he said.
No response from Iran's judiciary or government had been reported at the time of writing. Tehran Telegraph could not find an official statement on the case.
Article 262 of Iran's Islamic penal code makes insulting the Prophet punishable by death. Article 263 exempts statements made while intoxicated or without intent, according to LBC and Brit Brief.
Iran's Revolutionary Courts hear national security cases, while criminal courts handle other offences. The Supreme Court hears appeals. HRAI and IHRNGO are rights groups based outside Iran, and Khorasan is a daily newspaper published in Mashhad.
The Week and SSBCrack News reported that Ms Amini was first detained during the protests that began across Iran in January 2026. SSBCrack attributed figures on protest deaths and arrests to Hrana, the news agency of HRAI. Those figures have not been independently verified, and no Iranian official account of the arrests was found.
According to Brit Brief, the last documented executions for blasphemy in Iran were those of Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli-Zare on 8 May 2023. The report said such sentences remain relatively rare.
The same report said executions in Iran overall have risen to a three-decade high. It said rights groups had recorded at least 600 executions this year. Tehran Telegraph could not confirm that figure.
Reports of the sentence appeared in mid-October. Whether Ms Amini's lawyer has filed an appeal with the Supreme Court has not been confirmed.
Photo: mohammad hosein tabatabaeian / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
