The situation is becoming very dire amid the ongoing anti-government protests in Iran. There have been claims of a large number of dead bodies in a field in front of the Kahrizak Forensic Institute in Tehran. According to eyewitnesses, the area appears to be littered with dead, although independent confirmation of this is difficult due to the shutdown of internet and communication services. Speaking to Deutsche Welle (DW), a man who recently returned from Iran claimed that thousands of people may have been killed. He said that he had gone to Kahrizak with a friend to identify and retrieve his wife’s body. The woman was involved in a demonstration and was allegedly shot dead by security forces.
According to eyewitnesses, the night before the demonstration, gunshots from automatic weapons were heard in the area. After this, there were reports of many people missing and the bodies reaching the forensic center. Protests in Iran have continued for more than two weeks, but the internet has been shut down for several days and contact with the outside world has been virtually shut down. In this case, some videos are being sent out through Starlink satellite or smuggled out. Speaking to Reuters, an Iranian official claimed on Tuesday that more than 2,500 people had died. At the same time, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights Organization said the number of dead on Wednesday was at least 3,379. Activists say the actual figure could be much higher than 12,000.
In addition, authorities have detained more than 10,000 people. Human rights activists suspect that many of the detainees may be sentenced to death by running a show trial. The pro-government media is constantly describing the protesters as “terrorists” and “foreign agents”. Iran’s Justice Minister Amin Hossein Rahimi recently called the arrested people “criminals”. Apart from the police, a paramilitary organization called Basij has also been deployed to quell the protests. The organization is under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and is directly accountable to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Basij is known as a force extremely loyal to the radical ideology.