Iranian security forces have killed at least 326 people in a crackdown on nationwide protests since Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, Iran Human Rights said in an updated toll Saturday.
The Islamic republic has been gripped by protests that erupted over the death of Amini on September 16, three days after her arrest for an alleged breach of the country’s strict dress code for women.
The protests were fanned by fury over the dress rules for women, but have grown into a broad movement against the theocracy that has ruled Iran since the 1979 revolution.
“At least 326 people, including 43 children and 25 women, have been killed by security forces in the ongoing nationwide protests,” Oslo-based IHR said in a statement posted on its website.
The latest toll represents an increase of 22 since the rights group issued its previous figures on November 5.
It includes at least 123 people killed in the province of Sistan-Baluchistan, on Iran’s southeastern border with Pakistan, a figure which is also up, from 118 in IHR’s last toll.
Most of those were killed on September 30 when security forces opened fire on protesters after Friday prayers in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan — a massacre activists have dubbed “Bloody Friday.”
Those protests were triggered by the alleged rape in custody of a 15-year-old girl by a police commander in the province’s port city of Chabahar.
Analysts say the Baluchi were inspired by the protests that flared over Amini’s death, which were initially driven by women’s rights but expanded over time to include other grievances.
IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam called on the international community to act as soon as possible to halt the crackdown.
“Establishing an international investigation and accountability mechanism by the UN will both facilitate the process of holding the perpetrators accountable in the future and increase the cost of the continuous repression by the Islamic republic,” he said in the statement.
Another rights group, Amnesty International, has also called for such a mechanism, which it said was supported by a petition signed by more than one million people.
IHR said it was still investigating reports of other deaths, meaning the actual number killed “is certainly higher.”
Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, the two female journalists who first broke and reported the news of Mahsa Amini’s death at the hands of Iran’s morality police, have been labeled CIA agents in a statement released by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and the intelligence organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The statement accused both women of being “primary sources of news for foreign media” and claimed the nationwide protests were launched by the CIA and Israeli intelligence organization Mossad as a pre-planned operation.
Hamedi and Mohammadi are reportedly currently being held in the notorious Evin prison that saw fires break out earlier this month, leaving four dead and several injured.
The former, who was the first journalist to report on Amini’s killing, was accused of posing as a reporter and pushing the 22-year-old’s family into revealing information regarding her death.
Mohammadi was cited as having received training as a foreign agent abroad following her reporting on Amini’s funeral.Journalists across the country were shocked at the statement as the regime attempts to clamp down on the uprisings by suffocating the media.
“They’re closely monitoring us and I have been advised to cut all ties with foreign correspondents. I have received calls from abroad on my cellphone and if they monitor my phone records and find that someone from the west was calling, even if it’s a friend, that’ll be a huge risk,” one Iranian journalist told The Guardian.
Another said that the regime will “waste no time punishing the journalists. They know that there are people inside Iran, like myself, who are in touch with friends or media abroad. They’ll use this statement and conclusion to make more arrests, or worse, execute their own citizens for espionage.”
The popular protests, which kicked off over 40 days ago, have seen scores of protesters killed at the hands of the IRGC. Despite that, the movement has shown no signs of abating.
