Teheran - Hundreds of curious bystanders, including women and children, gathered in the early hours of August 2 in north Tehran to watch the execution of two Iranian men. The two had killed deputy general prosecutor Massoud Moqadas in August 2005 and had also been involved in rape, kidnapping and armed robbery.
"All criminals should be executed in public to deter others," a police officer at the venue said.
"To assure us women that we can go safely into the streets at night time, there should be zero tolerance for these lawbreakers," a woman in the crowd said.
Zero tolerance has indeed been the motto of both government and judiciary in the last two years.
On August 1 nine criminals were hanged in north- and south-eastern Iran. Sixteen, including 12 on one day, were executed last week. Since the beginning of the current year, more than 120 people were executed.
According to Amnesty International, there were more than 170 executions last year in Iran.
"For us they are terrorists, as they terrorize society," prosecutor general Saaid Mortazavi justified the recent wave of executions.
The main focus is currently on what police calls "arazel obash," violent hooligans and gangs who have spread fear in several cities nationwide.
A frequent case has been assaults on people coming out of the banks with large amounts of money. Last year several people were not only robbed but also severely injured by knives and clubs by organized gangs right in front of banks.
Tehran police chief General Ahmad-Reza Radan announced on state television that he would put an end to people's fears through a constant and decisive fight against the gangs.
Executions were held in Iran even before the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Under the current Iranian Islamic law, murder, rape, armed robbery, drug-trafficking of quantities in excess of five kilos and apostasy are punishable by death.
Western and human rights groups' critics have so far been ignored in Tehran as the majority of the Iranian people welcome death sentences, having no tolerance as far as murder, rape, child abuse or dealings with hard drugs are concerned and do not believe in psychological therapies for such criminals.
What is new however is the frequency of executions in public.
Unlike in prisons, in public executions nooses are tied to a crane arm mounted on the back of a truck to allow viewers to have a better view of the incident.
The process is more agonizing as the condemned person is not killed instantly. There have been no protests so far to this kind of execution, even by local human rights activists.
The West is however concerned that that the latest wave of executions of criminals would expand to political dissidents as well.
"The (Iranian) government also wants to show toughness internally, not only towards criminals but also political critics," said the director of the German office of Human Rights Watch, Marianne Heuwagen, said on German news channel N24.
Such concerns were strengthened after the death verdict against two Iranian-Kurdish journalists in Iran's western Kurdistan province.
It is not clear what the two have specifically committed but according to unconfirmed reports, they were not sentenced to death for their journalistic activities but affiliation to the Iran's Kurdistan party which has the same status in Iran as the PKK in Turkey.
The government in the recent months has however definitely toughened its approach towards opposition groups guided from abroad, especially from the United States.
Symbolic of the new approach are the four US-Iranian citizens who have been charged with espionage and have been either jailed or not allowed to leave the country.
Two of them, Haleh Esfandiari from the Wilson centre in Washington and Kian Tajbakhsh from the George Soros institute, told state television last month that they tried to weaken the Islamic system in Iran through a network with Iranian dissidents and intellectuals.
Tehran promptly interpreted their remarks as confessions to collaboration with archenemy US and confirmation of their spying charges.
