Iran on Monday executed a Jewish national convicted of killing another man in 2022 following a personal dispute, reports said. It was a rare case of the execution of a member of a religious minority in the predominantly Muslim nation.

Mizanonline.ir, a website affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, said Arvin Ghahremani, 23, was sentenced to death after the country’s Supreme Court upheld the death sentence handed down in the case early last year.

The report quoted Hamid Reza Karimi, the prosecutor of the western city of Kermanshah, as saying that the court and the convict’s lawyers and relatives had failed to persuade the victim’s family to refrain from qisas – an act under the Islamic penal code that calls for similar punishments. , or “an eye for an eye” – and effectively forgive his killer.

The victim’s name was not provided.

According to the report, Ghahramani attacked the victim outside a gym in Kermanshah in 2022 and stabbed the man multiple times following a dispute over money he had lent the victim.

Jewish citizens are a small minority in the country of 85 million. In 1999, Iran arrested 13 Jewish citizens, accused them of spying for Israel, and sentenced some to up to four years in prison.

Many Jews fled the country after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and current estimates suggest that around 20,000 Jews remain in Iran. Shia Muslims make up the majority of Iran’s population, and the institution is run by hardline clerics who preach a strict version of Islam.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)