PARIS: An Iranian court has sentenced to death a young man who was blinded in one eye during 2022 protests and then took refuge in Germany, and who has spoken out in favor of the ousted monarchy, rights groups said. Ali Zarei, 27, was last month convicted on the capital charge of “corruption on earth” and sentenced to hang, the US-based groups the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) and Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) said this week. It remains unclear why he returned to Iran earlier this year, months after he appeared at a February rally in Munich. The Frankfurt-based German rights group the International Society for Human Rights said Thursday that Zarei, who was originally from Ardabil in northern Iran but had been living in Tehran, had come to Germany for medical treatment after being fired on in the 2022 protests. It said he had been severely wounded by fire from security forces during the crackdown on the “Woman. Life. Freedom.” movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly violating the dress rules for women. He lost his right eye and wrote on Instagram at the time he had “given up my eye for the freedom of my country,” it said. It said he had returned to Iran “for personal reasons”, without giving further details, and was arrested immediately after his return. “The arrest of Ali Zarei demonstrates once again that the Islamic Republic stops at nothing — not even the victims of its own violence,” it said. Pahlavi’s office said in a statement on X that Zarei, who is being held in Ghezel Hesar prison in Karaj outside Tehran, had been sentenced to death on “baseless charges” and represented a “courageous generation of Iranians standing against the Islamic Republic”. In his speech from the stage at the Munich rally hosted by Pahlavi, the biggest such pro-monarchist gathering in recent times, he introduced himself as “Ali Zarei, survivor of eye injuries, from Iran’s 2022 national uprising”. He expressed gratitude to Pahlavi for his efforts “to free our Iran” and declared “1979 is over... long live the shah!”. Against the backdrop of the war against Israel and the United States, Iran has in the last months executed 29 people convicted in connection with protests this January as well as two over the 2022 Mahsa Amini demonstrations, according to rights groups. “The regime is once again employing the death penalty on a scale unprecedented in recent decades as a tool for revenge and to suppress opponents,” said the CHRI.