On 9 July 1850, the Bab was executed by firing squad in the city of Tabriz, on the order of Iranian civil authorities acting with the concurrence of the religious establishment that had long sought his death as a punishment for what it regarded as heresy. Baha'i accounts of the execution describe the Bab, along with a young follower named Anis who had asked to share his fate, being suspended by ropes against a barracks wall before a regiment of soldiers.
According to these accounts, an initial volley of gunfire severed the ropes suspending the two men without killing either of them, and the Bab was reportedly found afterward in a nearby room, having returned there to finish dictating instructions to a companion, before being brought back for a second attempt, which succeeded. Baha'i sources treat the episode of the first, ineffective volley as a significant and widely reported detail of the martyrdom, while acknowledging it rests on testimony collected after the event rather than on independent contemporary verification.
The execution took place amid the wider wave of violence against the Babi community in this period, and news of the Bab's death, along with the manner of it as later reported by his followers, spread quickly and became a central formative memory for the surviving Babi, and later Baha'i, community.