They shoot at demonstrators, kidnap corpses and secretly bury young people who have been killed: the authorities are reacting to the ongoing protests in Iran with massive violence. The government speaks of “terrorist actions” and blames the West for the uprisings.
According to activists, security forces in Iran have kidnapped the body of a killed protester from the hospital and attacked his family. According to the Norway-based human rights group Hengaw, members of the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps entered the Shahid Gholi Pur hospital in the western Iranian city of Bukan on Friday night, “seized the body of Shahrjar Mohammadi and secretly buried him”.
They also shot his family and injured “at least five people,” Hengaw told AFP. According to Hengaw, security forces also shot at demonstrators in the city of Diwandarreh in the province of Kurdistan. According to the organization, several people were injured.
Activists accuse the Iranian security forces of secretly burying dead protesters to prevent their burial from sparking further protests against the Iranian authorities. The funerals of several young people, including a nine-year-old child, sparked protests on Friday. According to reports from the media and non-governmental organizations, slogans were shouted against the rulers in Tehran in the cities of Iseh, Tabriz and Mahabad.
The wave of protests in Iran, which has now been going on for two months, was triggered by the death of the young Kurd Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old was arrested by the so-called moral police because she is said to have worn her Islamic headscarf in accordance with the rules. She died a short time later in hospital. Tehran is cracking down on the demonstrators.
Iran has accused Britain, Israel and the United States, among others, of fueling the protests. The Iranian Foreign Ministry has criticized the “deliberate silence of foreign sponsors of chaos and violence in Iran in the face of (…) terrorist actions in several Iranian cities”. It is “the duty of the international community” to condemn the “recent terrorist attacks in Iran and not to offer extremists a safe haven,” it said.
Ten people, including a woman, two children and a security official, were killed in two separate attacks in the cities of Iseh and Isfahan on Wednesday, state media and a hospital said. According to the state news agency Irna, two members of the pro-government Basij militia were also stabbed to death in the north-eastern city of Mashhad when they tried to intervene against “rioters”.