ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Iran executed a man on Thursday who was said to be tortured into confessing to a murder allegedly committed when he was 16.

Mohammad Hassan Rezaiee, 30, was arrested in 2007 in connection with a fatal stabbing during a fight the same year, and sent to prison.

On Wednesday, Amnesty Iran tweeted that Razaiee was “hours away from execution,” calling on authorities not to carry out the sentence.

He was sentenced to death in 2008 following a confession reportedly obtained under torture.

"His trial was grossly unfair,” the rights group said.

He was executed at dawn on Thursday at Rasht Central Prison, Iran Human Rights Organization quoted a relative as saying.

“After more than 12 years on death row, Mohammad Hassan Rezaiee was transferred to solitary confinement in Lakan Prison in Rasht on Thursday, and his family was told that his execution would be carried out ‘in a week’,” said Amnesty’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, Diana Eltahawy on December 18.

“Despite his young age, the authorities held him in prolonged solitary confinement, without access to his family and lawyer,” Eltahawy said. “They repeatedly tortured him to ‘confess’, including by beating him with sticks, kicking and punching him, and whipping him with pipe hoses,” she added.

The investigation was conducted by the Investigation Unit of Iran’s Police in Gilan province. Razaiee and his court-appointed lawyer said in court that his confessions were obtained under torture. His death sentence and conviction was then upheld by Iran’s Supreme Court, Amnesty said.

Extracting confessions under duress is commonly used by Iranian authorities to establish guilt .Between 2009 and 2019, Iranian state media broadcast forced confessions from least 355 individuals, according to a report published in June by Justice4Iran, a London-based human rights organization monitoring abuses in the country.

German politician and Human Rights commissioner Barbell Kofler previously appealed to Tehran to let Rezaiee live.

“I am seriously sending the message to the Iranian judiciary; respect your legal and civil obligations and prevent the execution of Mohammad Hassan Rezaiee,” Kofler said on December 19.

Under Article 91 of the 2013 Penal Code, judges do not have to issue death sentences if juvenile defendants – those accused of committing a while crime under the age of 18 - “doesn’t understand the nature of the crime.”

According to a UN report on human rights conditions in Iran published in July 2020, “at least four” children were executed in 2019, in violation of Conventions of the Rights of the Child to which Iran is a signatory.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, has called on Iran to “impose a moratorium on the death penalty."

Under Iranian law, executions can be imposed on girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 – Iran's threshold for adulthood - according to the UN.

In 2019, Iran executed at least 251 people, second only to China, according to Amnesty International.

Tehran has come under scrunity this year for a series of high-profile executions, including wrestler Nafid Akfari and exiled journalist Ruhollah Zam.

Rudaw