Paris:
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards opened fire on family members mourning a dead protester and seized his body from the hospital as fighting raged across the country overnight, a human rights group said on Saturday.
The country’s spiritual leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei faces its biggest challenge since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in two months of protests over the death of Mahsa Amini.
Authorities have responded with a crackdown, with the Olso-based group Iran Human Rights saying that at least 342 people have been killed, half a dozen have already been sentenced to death and thousands more have been arrested.
Protesters have been killed in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, IHR said Wednesday, including 123 in Sistan-Baluchistan and 32 in Amini’s home province of Kurdistan, where violence flared overnight in the city of Bukan.
“Last night, after IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards) troops attacked Shahid Gholi Pur Hospital in Bukan, they seized the body of Shahryar Mohammadi and buried him secretly,” the Norway-based Hengaw rights group said.
“These troops opened fire on his family, causing injuries to at least five people,” Hengaw, who monitors abuses in Kurdish areas, told AFP.
Activists accuse Iran’s security forces of conducting secret funerals of protesters they killed in order to prevent further violence from erupting at their funerals.
The security forces also opened fire on protesters in the town of Divandarreh, Kurdistan province, injuring several people, Hengaw said on Saturday.
Iran has accused its foreign enemies — including Britain, Israel and the United States — of inciting violence in the country during protests since the September 16 death of Amini in custody.
Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish descent, died three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious vice squad for an alleged violation of the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab law.
In a statement, Iran’s foreign ministry lashed out at the “deliberate silence of foreign promoters of chaos and violence in Iran in the face of … terrorist operations in several Iranian cities.”
“It is the duty of the international community and international assemblies to condemn the recent acts of terrorism in Iran and not to provide a safe haven for extremists,” it added.
Two separate attacks in the cities of Izeh and Isfahan on Wednesday killed 10 people, including a woman, two children and a security officer, according to state media and a hospital source.
According to the state news agency IRNA, two members of the pro-government Basij paramilitary force were stabbed to death in the northeastern city of Mashhad as they tried to intervene against “rioters”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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