An Iranian revolutionary court has sentenced well-known Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for charges linked to Iran's 2022-23 unrest, his lawyer told the Iranian newspaper Sharq on Wednesday.
Salehi in his songs supported months of protests in Iran in 2022 sparked by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman arrested for allegedly wearing an "improper" hijab.
Salehi was initially arrested in October 2022 after making public statements in support of the nationwide protests.
He was sentenced in 2023 to six years and three months in prison but avoided a death sentence due to a Supreme Court ruling.
"Branch One of the Revolutionary Court of (the central city of) Isfahan in an unprecedented move, did not enforce the Supreme Court's ruling .... and sentenced Salehi to the harshest punishment," his lawyer Amir Raisian told Sharq.
The Iranian judiciary has not confirmed the sentence yet. Salehi has 20 days to appeal the ruling.