New student demonstrations accompanied by strikes in businesses took place on Saturday in Iran despite increased repression, according to human rights defenders, seven weeks after the death of Mahsa Amini.
The young Iranian Kurd died on September 16, three days after her arrest in Tehran by the morality police who accused her of having broken the strict dress code of the Islamic Republic, imposing on women the wearing of the veil in public.
On Saturday, security forces used new methods against protesters at universities in Tehran, searching students and forcing those wearing masks to remove them in order to identify them, activists said.
Despite this, students protested at the Islamic University of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, shouting “I am a free woman, you are the perverts”, according to a video released by BBC Persian.
“A student dies, but does not accept the humiliation,” students at Gilan University in Rasht, northern Iran, shouted in a video uploaded by an activist.
AFP was unable to immediately verify these videos.
“Anger” and “Resistance”
The wave of protest triggered across the country by the death at age 22 of Mahsa Amini is unprecedented in its scale and nature since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Over the days, demonstrations for women’s freedom have turned into a protest directed against power, while the Iranian regime denounces “riots”.
In Qazvin, northwestern Iran, dozens of protesters shouted anti-regime slogans on Saturday during a tribute to slain protester Javad Heydari, 40 days after his death.
According to the Norwegian-based NGO Hengaw, which defends the rights of Kurds in Iran, a “widely followed strike” was observed on Saturday in Saghez, the birthplace of Mahsa Amini, in the Kurdistan province, where shops had fallen the curtain.
“Our weapon is our unity, our weapon is our anger, our weapon is our resistance […] We cannot oppose the will of the people,” Hassan Ronaghi, brother of well-known human rights activist Hossein, tweeted.
A video broadcast by Manoto, a foreign-based television channel banned in Iran, appeared to show students locked inside the Islamic Azad University in Tehran.
The repression of this wave of protest by the security forces has killed at least 186 people, according to a new report published on Saturday by the NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR) based in Norway. Thousands of people have been arrested, including journalists, lawyers, activists and celebrities, according to NGOs.
“Massacre” in Khach
According to IHR, 118 people were also killed in another protest movement in Zahedan, Sistan-Baluchistan, triggered on September 30 after the alleged rape of a young girl by a police officer. This impoverished region of southeastern Iran is populated by the Baloch minority, mostly adhering to Sunni Islam and not to the dominant Shiism in Iran.
In a new outbreak of violence in this province, security forces fired on protesters in Khach, near Zahedan, on Friday, NGOs said. Ten people may have been killed and dozens more injured, according to Amnesty International.
The cleric who said Friday prayers in Zahedan, Molavi Abdol Hamid, denounced the “massacre” of demonstrators, reporting 16 dead.
Videos verified by AFP show youths running for cover and screaming, as gunfire echoes in Khach and Zahedan.
An official in Kerman province, also in the southeast, acknowledged that authorities were struggling to quell the protests.
“Internet restrictions, arrests of riot leaders and government presence on the streets always put an end to sedition, but this type of sedition and its audience are different,” the provincial official said. for politics and security, Rahman Jalali, quoted by the Isna news agency.