The scene reported to the Iranian press by the deputy Mahmoud Sadeghi takes place one day in December in the Parliament. Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli answers questions from Assembly members about the bloody crackdown on the protest movement launched in November. An elected official thus evokes the case of two inhabitants of his city, Karaj, where the violence was particularly harsh. They were killed by the police, shot in the head and live ammunition. "Wasn't it rather possible to target the legs?" " asked the deputy. The Minister replied: "But there were also bullets shot in the legs! " A "Nonchalance" which would have amazed the parliamentarians, according to Mr. Sadeghi.
The exchange is emblematic of how the Iranian government is handling the violence of its repression of the November movement, with at least 304 dead, according to Amnesty International. Which would make it the bloodiest in the history of the Islamic Republic. Thousands of Iranians have been arrested, including 15-year-old children, according to the NGO, after mass protests started first against the sharp rise in gas prices and then against the regime itself. For the moment, the Iranian authorities refuse to give the official toll of the victims. The scale of the atrocities and the violence of the police have been revealed by touches since the end of the movement.
So according to information from the World, on Sunday 15 December, the body of a young Iranian, Ershad Rahmanian, was found near the Garan dam, some ten kilometers from the Kurdish town of Marivan, where the repression was particularly harsh. The 23-year-old had disappeared four weeks earlier, said his cousin Kamyar Ahmadi, who lives in Norway, on Twitter.
Feeling of asphyxiation
The family believed that the young man was arrested on November 17 in front of the city hospital where he worked as an emergency room. According to Kamyar Ahmadi, the young man's body was covered with traces of torture. He was buried under heavy police surveillance the next day in a valley, shortly before sunset. Authorities pressured the family to confirm that their son had committed suicide after a sentimental failure.
Other information published by Persian-speaking media abroad, including the BBC in Persian, indicates that other bodies – at least five – have been found elsewhere in Iranian Kurdistan, but also in Khuzistan, a province with a majority Arab. In Tehran, as well as in other cities across the country, families gather daily in front of prisons, looking for news of their loved ones detained since the protests.
