3 protesters shot dead in Mahsa Amini’s home province
Demonstations rage in Bukan where guards opened fire
Iranian security forces shot dead at least three people yesterday in the western province of Kurdistan in the latest deadly protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a rights group said.
The country’s clerical leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is facing its biggest challenge since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, in two months of violent demonstrations following Amini’s death in custody on September 16.
The authorities have responded with a crackdown that Olso-based group Iran Human Rights says has left dead at least 342 people, half a dozen already sentenced to death and more than 15,000 arrested.
Yesterday, Hengaw, a Norway-based rights group which monitors abuses in Kurdish areas, told AFP that “the government’s repressive forces opened fire on protesters in the town of Divandarreh, killing at least three civilians”.
Protesters have been killed in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, IHR said Wednesday, including 123 in Sistan-Balochistan and 32 in Amini’s home province of Kurdistan.
Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police over an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s mandatory hijab headscarf law.
Protester’s corpse ‘seized’
Protests raged overnight in the town of Bukan in Kurdistan, where Revolutionary Guards opened fire on family members mourning a slain protester and taking his body from hospital before burying it in an undisclosed location, Hengaw said.
Activists accuse Iran’s security forces of carrying out secret burials of protesters they have killed, to prevent more violence from flaring at their funerals.
“Last night, after (IRGC) Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces attacked Shahid Gholi Pur Hospital in Bukan, they seized Shahryar Mohammadi’s body and buried him secretly,” Hengaw said, adding that the forces “opened fire on his family and inflicted injuries on at least five of them”.
Elsewhere, hundreds of mourners were seen marching yesterday along a road near Mahabad in West Azerbaijan province for the funeral of Kamal Ahmadpour, a young man shot dead by the security forces, in a video published by the 1500tasvir monitor. “The Islamic Republic of Iran’s forces have significantly increased the use of lethal weapons in attacks on protesters in the past five days,” Hengaw told AFP.
The rights group said the security forces had killed at least 25 people in Kurdistan since Tuesday, when protesters thronged streets on the anniversary of a lethal 2019 crackdown known as “Bloody Aban” - or Bloody November. “Twenty-three people were killed by direct fire, one by torture, and one by knife stabs,” Hengaw said.
The state-run Iran newspaper yesterday reported that 14 security personnel had been killed in the three days of protests called to mark the November 15 anniversary.