At least 208 people in Iran have been killed amid protests over sharply rising petrol prices and a subsequent crackdown by security forces, Amnesty International says, as one government official acknowledged telling police to shoot demonstrators.
Iran has yet to release any nationwide statistics over the unrest that gripped the Islamic Republic beginning November 15 with minimum prices for government-subsidised petrol rising by 50 per cent.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations disputed Amnesty’s findings early on Tuesday, though it offered no evidence to support its claim.
Iran shut down internet access amid the unrest, blocking those inside the country from sharing their videos and information, as well as limiting the outside world from knowing the scale of the protests and violence.
The restoration of the internet in recent days across much of the country has seen other videos surface.
“We’ve seen over 200 people killed in a very swift time, in under a week,” said Mansoureh Mills, an Iran researcher at Amnesty.
“It’s something pretty unprecedented in the history of the human rights violations in the Islamic Republic.”
In a statement on Monday, Amnesty said “the real figure is likely to be higher”.
Read the article by Jon Gambrell in the Western Advocate.