Four fingers of an Iranian prisoner who was sentenced to amputation for robbery were cut off in Tehran’s Evin Prison with a guillotine-like device that the prison has recently acquired. 

A former political prisoner and civil rights activist, Arash Sadeghi, said in a tweet on Thursday that the guillotine machine arrived at the prison about a month ago and was installed at the infirmary to carry out such sentences. 

According to Sadeghi, the man whose fingers were cut off on Tuesday had been transferred from the Kermanshah prison to carry out the sentence.

He added that three other prisoners convicted of robbery, namely Hadi Rostami, Mehdi Sharafian, and Mehdi Shahivand, have been transferred from the Orumiyeh prison in the northwestern province of West Azarbaijan to Evin to carry out their amputation sentences. 

According to Islamic Sharia law, punishment for theft can be amputation of fingers or hands.

The three prisoners have spent five years waiting for their sentence to be carried out.

Human rights organization Amnesty International had previously condemned the move to “deliberately mutilate and traumatize prisoners through unspeakably cruel judicial corporal punishments.”

Their trial was grossly unfair and relied on “confessions” which the men have said were obtained under torture and other ill-treatment while they were detained, without access to their lawyers, Amnesty said in December 2020. 

Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an Australian-British academic previously jailed in Iran for over two years, deplored the move, describing the procedure as “barbaric and medieval.”