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Iran appears to have entered a cycle of deadly violence after three more people were killed by security officers overnight during a protest rally held after the funeral for another protester killed on Wednesday.
Funerals for protesters have become flash points in the weeks-long unrest that has gripped the clerical state since the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini on 16 September.
Hengaw, a Norway-based human rights group, said security forces shot dead at least three protesters in the city of Mahabad near Iran’s western border with Iraq on Thursday night.
The deadly gunfire came after mourners paying tribute to Ismail Mauludi, a 35-year-old protester killed on Wednesday night, left his funeral and made their way towards the governor’s office.
“Death to the dictator,” protesters yelled, using a slogan aimed at Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the Mahabad governor’s office burned.
Amnesty International said in a statement late on Thursday that “unlawful killings” by Iran’s security forces had claimed the lives of at least eight people in four provinces within 24 hours.
In a highly unusual admission of fault on the part of Iran’s security apparatus, authorities in Sistan and Baluchestan province said the head of police in the provincial capital Zahedan had been sacked due to “deficiencies” in his handling of protests in the city on 30 September.
An internal inquiry found that police had fired on protesters and that this contributed to what the inquiry said was a total death toll of 35. An order to pay compensation to the families of the victims has also been issued in a further sign that the Iranian state fears that tensions in the province have not subsided.
The Zahedan protest had been called in response to the reported rape of a teenage girl by a police commander. Rights groups have put the death toll from that day – which has come to be known as Bloody Friday among Iranians – at above 90.
After a second successive night of protests around the country, the United Nations human rights office said on Friday that it was concerned that authorities were refusing to release some of the bodies of those killed.
“We’ve seen a lot of ill treatment … but also harassment of the families of protesters,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson of the office of the high commissioner for human rights, told a Geneva press briefing. “Of particular concern is information that authorities have been moving injured protesters from hospitals to detention facilities and refusing to release the bodies of those killed to their families,” she said.
Shamdasani added that in some cases, authorities were placing conditions on the release of bodies, asking families not to hold a funeral or speak to the media.
In a related incident, the family of the well-known journalist Reza Haghighatnejad have accused security agents of abducting his body following his death in Germany in order to prevent his funeral taking place.
Haghighatnejad, a former editor at IranWire and eloquent exiled critic of the regime, died from cancer in Berlin on 17 October at the age of 45. His body was repatriated to Iran for burial on 25 October.
In comments made on video, his mother said: “I have not seen my son in six years. They let me bring his body to Iran, but Sepah (the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) or police abducted his body at the airport.”
Haghighatnejad’s sister Sara said she had been unable to find any information on his body.
RFE/RL, where he worked from 2019 until his death, quoted relatives and friends as saying the necessary permits have been issued to bury the body in Haghighatnejad’s home town of Shiraz. But the family is now being pressured by the security and intelligence agencies to agree to his body being buried in another cemetery located outside the city.
RFE/RL president and CEO, Jamie Fly, said the Iranian regime’s manipulation of Haghighatnejad’s family was “disgraceful and disgusting”, and that they deserve to be allowed to bury him without harassment.
The Iranian regime and its allies have falsely tried to link the protests sparked by Amini’s death to a mass shooting at a shrine in Shiraz on Wednesday that has been claimed by the Islamic State group.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and militant group Hezbollah, drew a direct link between the two on Thursday when he said: “Those who have been directing the recent unrest in Iran are the ones that dispatched assailants to Shiraz to kill innocent people.”
Mohammad Ismail Kothari, an elected representative for Tehran in Iran’s parliament claimed without evidence that the shrine attack “was definitely not without support, and it has been financially and politically supported by the countries that have been opposing us in the past 40 days”.
There is wider anger in Iranian official circles at the perception that western media did not cover the Shiraz attack to the same extent as the protest movement.
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