Two killed as Iranians protest regime, chanting ‘Mullahs get lost!’
At least two protesters were killed by security forces in Iran Saturday as anti-government demonstrations flared again, four weeks after the death of a young woman in police custody.
A driver was shot dead in the northern city of Sanandaj after he honked at police stationed on a major thoroughfare, human rights monitors said. Gruesome photos of the man’s bloodied body circulated online.
A second protester was killed in the same city and 10 others wounded when security forces fired shots to disperse the angry crowds, according to the Kurdistan Human Rights Network.
In Tehran, furious female protesters chanted “Raisi get lost” and other anti-regime slogans as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited the all-women Alzahra University to mark National Student’s Day.
The hard-line president repeated his allegations that foreign enemies are to blame for the protests that began erupting four weeks ago, after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in state custody after being arrested for violating the nation’s strict women’s dress code.
“The enemy thought that it can pursue its desires in universities while unaware that our students and teachers are aware and they will not allow the enemies’ vain plans to be realized,” Raisi said in a speech to professors and students — during which he also recited a poem that compared “rioters” to flies.
But the female students responded “Raisi get lost” and “Mullahs get lost” during the president’s visit to campus, Reuters reported.
And in videos filmed across the country Saturday — including the northeastern city of Mashhad and multiple neighborhoods in Tehran, the capital — women could be seen burning their headscarves or whipping them off to wave in the air.
A mixed-gender crowd marched through the streets of Arak, a city in central Iran, chanting “We will kill, we will kill he who killed our sister,” according to videos posted to Twitter.
Renewed anger swept the country on Thursday and Friday, after the families of two teenaged girls — Nika Shakarami, 17, and Sarina Esmaeilzadeh, 16 — accused security forces of beating their protesting daughters to death in September.
On Friday, chief justice Hossein Fazeli Herikandi claimed that Shakarami had killed herself by jumping off a roof — a claim that the regime has made for Esmaeilzadeh as well.
But Shakarami’s grieving mother said her daughter’s body was intact — while some of her teeth, bones in her face, and part of the back of her skull were broken.
“The damage was to her head,” the mother told Radio Farda. “Her body was intact, arms and legs.”
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