Despite the bloody intervention of the security forces, new protests broke out over the death of a young woman who was detained by the morale police on Saturday, according to official figures, and 41 people were killed, according to official figures.
Iran’s main reform party called on the state yesterday to end the obligation for women to wear the veil in public. The reason for the arrest of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was the use of an Islamic scarf.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), hundreds of protesters, reform activists and 17 journalists were arrested, including Niloufar Hamedi of the reformist newspaper Shargh, who reported Mahsa’s death.
State television announced that the death toll was 41. It also showed footage of protesters saying that protesters set fire to public and private property in “some provinces”, as well as the streets of northern and western Tehran.
Iran’s Human Rights group put the death toll at 54, excluding security guards, and said in many cases authorities made returning the bodies to their families conditional on accepting a secret burial. The Oslo-based NGO noted that most of the deaths occurred in the provinces of Guilan and Mazandaran.
Web tracker NetBlocks reported that Skype was restricted in the country as part of the outage in communications affecting other platforms and social networks such as Instagram, WhatsApp and LinkedIn.
Militia bases attacked
Authorities have reported waves of arrests: the Guilan police chief announced that “739 protesters, including 60 women, were arrested” in that province alone.
Protests broke out again in Rasht, the state capital, and various parts of Tehran on Saturday night, according to videos posted on social media. Witnesses told AFP that riot police were deployed in large numbers in northern Tehran after dark.
According to the Norwegian-based Kurdish human rights NGO Hengaw, protesters “take control” of parts of the town of Oshnavih in West Azerbaijan province.
The Iranian judiciary acknowledged that protesters attacked three bases of Basij, a state-run Islamic militia, in Oshnaviyeh, but denied that security forces had lost control of the city.
Iran’s president, ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisi, said he had to “decide” with those behind the violence. The statement came shortly after Amnesty International warned of “the risk of further bloodshed”, facilitated by the “deliberate internet outage” by authorities to curb demonstrations and prevent print images from reaching abroad.
The London-based NGO said evidence collected in 20 cities across Iran points to “a gruesome pattern in which Iranian security forces deliberately and illegally fired real ammunition at protesters”.
Hundreds of people demonstrated in Europe today in Paris, Athens, Madrid and other cities to condemn the Iranian authorities’ actions against the protests.
source: Noticias
