Paris (AFP) - Iran carried out its first public execution in more than two years on Saturday by hanging a man convicted of killing a policeman, a non-governmental organization reported, amid growing concern over growing repression in the country.

The Norway-based Iranian non-governmental human rights organization said, based on information reported by official Iranian media, that the worker, Eman Sabzkar, who was convicted of killing a policeman in February 2022 in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz, was hanged early in the morning at the crime scene.

In early July, the Supreme Court publicly confirmed his death sentence.

"The resumption of this brutal punishment in public places aims to frighten and intimidate people so that they do not demonstrate," said the director of the organization, Mahmoud Amiri Moghadam, calling on the international community to respond firmly and protest against this "medieval" practice.

Pictures spread on social media, allegedly of the execution, showed a man dressed as a prisoner hanging several meters from the ground with a rope attached to a truck crane.

Executions in Iran are usually carried out inside prisons.

The organization said that public executions are used as a deterrent, especially when it comes to killing a member of the security forces, noting that the last public execution in Iran was on June 11, 2020.

The organization expressed its concern that four men who were sentenced to death for killing police officers in separate but similar cases would face the same fate, noting that the number of executions in the Islamic Republic doubled in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2021.

Activists have expressed in recent weeks their concern about an increasing crackdown in Iran, which is witnessing unusual protests due to the economic crisis. Well-known intellectuals and film directors have been arrested.