Why Iran abducted and hanged Ruhollah Zam

EVEN BY IRAN’SBBC standards the justice was rough. Four days after sentence was passed, Ruhollah Zam was hanged. The judge said he had spied, incited violence and “sown corruption on earth”. Most Iranians took that to mean that he had simply disagreed with the right of the ayatollahs to rule.Mr Zam had been a remarkable dissident. In 2011 he went to Paris to escape the regime and, four years later, launched Amad, a news channel on Telegram, a messaging app. At its peak Amad had more subscribers than the ’s Persian service, which many Iranians rely on. He exposed the sexual and financial peccadilloes of the regime’s top turbans. The son of an influential cleric and an alumnus of a school in Tehran, the capital, favoured by the elite, he had a wide web of contacts.