INTERNATIONAL
Security forces shot dead at least three people in Iran‘s Kurdistan province on Saturday as protests continue over the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, according to a rights group.
Government forces “opened fire on protesters in the town of Divandarreh, killing at least three civilians”, Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights, a Norway-based Kurdish human rights group focusing on Iranian Kurdistan, told AFP.
The incident came as demonstrations over the death of Amini, who died after being detained by morality police for wearing an “inappropriate hijab” in Tehran in September, show no signs of abating more than two months after they began.
The upheaval marks one of the most serious threats to the Islamic Republic since its establishment in the wake of the 1979 revolution, and the security services have responded harshly.
Hengaw said protests raged overnight in the town of Bukan in Kurdistan after officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp opened fire on family members mourning the death of a protester and seized his body from hospital.
Demonstrators have accused the Iranian state of carrying out secret burials of killed activists to prevent their funerals becoming rallying points for further protests.
‘Foreign promoters of chaos’
Elsewhere in the country, videos published by the opposition media account 1500tasvir showed hundreds of mourners marching along a road near Mahabad, in West Azerbaijan province, for the funeral of Kamal Ahmadpour, who was shot dead by the security forces.
The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights says the crackdown has so far left at least 342 people dead.
The group said 43 children and 25 women are among those killed.
Thousands more have been arrested, while at least two people have publicly been sentenced to death.
Hengaw told Middle East Eye on Tuesday the “fate and whereabouts of most of the detainees are unknown till this moment”.
“All the detainees who were arrested during the protests are in danger of being sentenced to death by the Iranian judicial system.”
The government has, however, pointed the finger at foreign forces which it says are attempting to stir chaos in the country.
On Saturday, the foreign ministry hit out in a statement at what it called the “deliberate silence of foreign promoters of chaos and violence in Iran in the face of… terrorist operations in several Iranian cities”.
State news agency IRNA reported that two members of Iran’s pro-government Basij paramilitary force had been stabbed to death earlier this week in the northeastern city of Mashhad while trying to intervene against what it called “rioters”.
Source: Middle East Eye
Photo: Twitter/PDKI
