Reports received By Iran International say Iran’s security forces Thursday night beat two young brothers Vahid and Habib Afkari in jail and transferred them to the "disciplinary ward" of the prison.

The third brother, Navid who has been sentenced to death has been moved to an unknown location; a worrying development, given the practice in Iran of moving prisoner on death row to a different location before execution.

The three brothers were arrested in the summer of 2018 after participating in protests in the city of Shiraz against economic hardship. Later, they were accused of killing a security agent during the protests and Navid, a sportsman was convicted to death.

People arrested for political reasons do not receive due process of law and their trials are held behind closed doors, with no opportunity to challenge the prosecution’s claims.

Both the defense attorney of Navid Afkari and a reformist political activist have said that he has been moved out of the prison and to an unknown location.

Afkari’s death sentence has led to a worldwide outcry, by thousands of people raising a Twitter storm demanding the decision to be suspended. President Donald Trump also took to Twitter September 4 to ask the Islamic Republic not to execute the young man who is a wrestler.

The government-controlled state TV has indicated it will show a program revealing Afkari’s “confession” to murder. Iran is notorious for forcing political prisoners to confess and then showing the confession or statements of repentance on TV. International human rights organizations have strongly criticized Iran for the practice.

Navid and his brothers have complained that they have been tortured in prison and forced to make self-incriminating statements. However, Navid has insisted in a message sent from jail that he has never accepted responsibility for the killing of the security agent, and if the government shows any film it would be a highly edited version of his interrogations.

The prosecution claims the death sentence was based on CCTV footage, but Navid’s lawyer says the only existing images are from an hour before the murder.

An Iranian human rights monitoring group has reported that when Navis’s brothers were being moved from the political wing of the prison other inmates began to resist. Anti-riot police attacked the prisoners beating them to submission.