A poet from an Arab minority community has been executed in Iran with a fellow teacher after being convicted for “enmity against God”, “corruption on earth”, “gathering and colluding against state security” and “spreading propaganda against the system”, the pressure group PEN International has said. Relatives of Hashem Shaabani, 31, were reportedly told on 29 January that he had been executed “three or four days before, PEN International said.

Shaabani was arrested in September 2011, along with four other men, apparently in connection with cultural activities on behalf of Iran’s Ahwazi Arab minority. All five men had no access to a lawyer or their families for the first nine months of their detention and are reported to have been tortured or otherwise ill-treated before and after the verdict.

Accoridng to the Arabic newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat,  Shaabani was especially known in cultural circles because of the poetry he published in Persian and Arabic. As a student leader he led a number of sit-ins and marches to protest against arbitrary arrests of students and the expulsion of professors in 2008 and 2009, and wrote a blog in which he called for greater freedom of expression and political openness.

Much of Shaabani’s poetry is said to be non-political, depicting the beauties of his home province of Khuzestan. One of his odes is ‘Homage to Karoun’, Iran’s largest and only navigable river. In another poem he speaks of  “the blonde sun of Khuzestan".