Iran falsified the number of executions in the country to hide the fact that in the last six months, it killed as many as 694 people, Amnesty has claimed in its latest report.

The report noted that there has been a 'staggering' increase in the number of judicial executions this  year. However, as per the records made available by Iran, there have been only 246 executions.

Amnesty, however, noted that it has credible information that Iran has not acknowledge further 448 executions carried out between 1 January and 15 July 2015. Based on its calculations, three people were being executed every day in Iran, the organisation said.

"Each year, Iranian authorities acknowledge a certain number of judicial executions. However, many more judicial executions are carried out but not acknowledged," the Amnesty report said.

Similarly in 2014, as per the data provided by Iran, there were 289 executions but Amnesty figures stood at a 'staggering' 743.

The report noted that this year, the number of executions has seen as an "unprecedented spike." "Iran's staggering execution toll for the first half of this year paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the State carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale," said Said Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"If Iran's authorities maintain this horrifying execution rate, we are likely to see more than 1,000 State-sanctioned deaths by the end of the year," he added.

In last May, Iran carried out "a wave of secret execution inside the country's prisons," executing 59 people in a matter of six days, reports said. 

France-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a political umbrella coalition of five Iranian opposition political organisations, had then told IBTimes India that the 'Mulllah regime' was using death penalty as a means to strike fear into the hearts of the youth.

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