On Thursday dozens of locals gathered at a cemetery in a village near Shiraz under the watchful eyes of plainclothes security agents and chanted “Navid Was a Hero.”

Villagers were venting their anger at the execution on September 12 of 27-year-old wrestler and political prisoner, Navid Afkari. Their determination to congregate came as families of the victims of a passenger plane shot down in January by the military turned an old revolutionary song into a protest against Iran’s current rulers.

“Those participating in the memorial for Navid Afkari looked more angry than sad,” wrote one Twitter user. “God knows when the fire of their wrath is going to rise from the embers.”

The authorities allowed only Afkari’s immediate family to attend his burial on Saturday evening. But on Thursday many others turned out for the cemetery at Sangar, Afkari’s home village 50 km from Shiraz, although the family had not made any public announcement of their intention to gather at his gravesite.

Social media users called for another memorial on Friday at the cemetery on the occasion of the seventh day of Afkari’s burial. Some on Friday morning reported that a helicopter was patrolling the area in anticipation, a claim apparently supported by video posted on Twitter.

Afkari was executed in the early hours of Saturday despite appeals from international human rights and athletic organizations, world leaders and a massive social media campaign to save his life.

The execution was highly controversial as Afkari maintained his innocence and that he had confessed to killing a state security agent during last year’s anti-government protests only under immense psychological and physical duress.

Controversy continues as discrepancies in judiciary officials’ accounts are highlighted. Lawyers of the family maintain that normal legal procedures for carrying out death sentences were ignored in Afkari’s hastily-arranged and secretly carried-out execution. Eyewitnesses who saw the face of the wrestling champion before burial say he may have died under torture.

Security forces are concerned that any memorial service for Afkari might flare into anti-government protests. According to Iranian Human Rights Monitoring, security forces on Thursday blocked the main streets of Behbahan, a city in oil-rich Khuzestan province, to prevent a rally to honor Afkari and made several arrests.

On July 16, Behbahan saw large anti-government protests – with demonstrators chanting slogans against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - against death sentences passed on three other protesters.

Also on Thursday, hundreds of kilometers from the village where Afkari is buried, the families of the victims of Ukraine’s flight PS752, shot down by the Iranian military in January, gathered at the crash site near Tehran. They held a memorial and sang ‘Tulips Rise from the Blood of the Nation’s [Fallen] Youth,’ a revolutionary song popular in the 1970s. Some chanted ‘Death to the dictator.’

Many of the families of victims of the January 8 crash hold the authorities responsible as it was missiles fired by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) that downed the passenger plane, killing all 176 onboard. The Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims (752AFV) on Thursday said security forces had taken photos of the participants at the ceremony and of their cars and that some cars were vandalized, presumably to intimidate them.

Thursday also marked the day-40 ‘arba-een’ memorial of Mostafa Salehi, a young man executed on August 5 after his conviction for killing a member of the IRGC’s Basij militia during protests in January 2018. Salehi had said he had confessed under torture. The ceremony in Salehi’s home village of Kahrizak near Isfahan on Thursday, as seen from a video posted on Twitter, was low-key, possibly due to pressure on his family not to encourage anyone to attend.