Iranian security forces have clashed with protesters who had gathered in their thousands in Mahsa Amini’s home town to mark 40 days since her death, with reports that shots were fired.
“Security forces have shot teargas and opened fire on people in Zindan Square, Saqqez city,” Hengaw, a Norway-based group that monitors rights violations in Iran’s Kurdish regions, tweeted without specifying whether there were any dead or wounded. It said more than 50 civilians were injured by direct fire in cities across the region.
Witnesses confirmed shots were fired, while the Iranian government said security forces had been forced to respond to riots. Iran later tried to block internet access in the region.
The 40th day after a death traditionally marks the end of mourning, and appeals had gone out for protesters to take to the streets, a call that was answered in Tehran, Isfahan and Mashhad. Reports of teargas being fired in Iran were backed by video evidence.
Despite a ban by the security forces, the biggest gathering was in Amini’s home town of Saqqez in the western Kurdistan province. Amini died on 16 September, three days after she was arrested by the morality police for being dressed inappropriately. An official inquiry said she collapsed due to a pre-existing condition, an explanation rejected by Amini’s family, who have been prevented from choosing any doctors on the medical examination panel.
Her death sparked unexpected protests involving many students and schoolgirls, removing and burning their headscarves and confronting security forces on the street.
Mourners headed to Amini’s gravesite on Wednesday morning even though the security services had warned her family not to hold the ceremony, threatening that “they should worry for their son’s life”, according to activists. As many as 10,000 mourners attended, arriving on foot as well as in cars and on motorcycles.
“Death to the dictator,” mourners chanted at the Aichi cemetery outside Saqqez, before many were seen heading to the governor’s office in the city centre. Iran’s Fars news agency said about 2,000 people gathered in Saqqez city and chanted “woman, life, freedom”.
Images shared by Hengaw showed the heavy presence of security forces overnight in Saqqez. They had reportedly shut entrances to the city and closed roads leading to Aichi cemetery and Amini’s graveside.
In one video the group chant: “Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists.” But they also address claims that the protests are part of a Kurdish separatist movement by saying there is solidarity in Tehran and Kurdistan.
The shootings appear to have happened when a smaller group marched to the governor’s office in Saqqez.
The protests extended far beyond Iranian Kurdistan to many cities around the country, with one group of students at Amirkabir University in Tehran chanting at the police: “We are free women, you are the whores.” Large groups gathered at the universities of Isfahan and Ahvaz, and at Azad University and Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, while a giant poster of Iran’s revolutionary leader was burned down at Mashhad.
Hengaw said strikes by workers were under way in Saqqez as well as Divandarreh, Marivan, Kamyaran and Sanandaj, and in Javanrud and Ravansar in the western province of Kermanshah.
Kurdistan governor Esmail Zarei-Kousha accused Iran’s foes of being behind the unrest.
“The enemy and its media ... are trying to use the 40-day anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death as a pretext to cause new tensions but fortunately the situation in the province is completely stable,” he said, quoted by state news agency IRNA.
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Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian dual national held in jail in Tehran for five years, speaking in London at a Thomson Reuters conference, fought back tears as she praised the new internet generation on the streets of Iran “risking their lives and fighting for freedom”.
Apologising as she wiped away tears, she said the response to Amini’s death “sparked rays of hope for all of us, not just in Iran but across the globe, that hopefully justice will prevail”. She said Amini’s name had become the code for freedom.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe added that “the new, very different generation know a lot about freedom, they want a more transparent government, better lifestyle, freedom of speech and decent jobs, they know about rights and they are prepared to take risks to get it”. She said this generation had learned about freedom from the internet, TikTok and satellite TV, and would not back down.
She said: “Today the regime is not only fighting to maintain its power, but for its survival. The foundation of the Islamic Republic is based on terror. They survive in a system of repression. They have no limits to their brutality and oppression. The security forces arrest protesters and put them in solitary confinement, which is one of the most brutal yet less physical violent forms of torture.”
The west, she said, had a responsibility to ensure that Iranian state censorship was overcome, and to hold the Iranian regime to account.
The regime will be hoping the 40th day protests are a last gasp for the demonstrations, rather than a moment they reignite. Iranian judicial officials announced this week that they would put more than 600 people on trial for their role in the protests, including 315 in Tehran, 201 in the neighbouring Alborz province and 105 in the south-western province of Khuzestan.
Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights said the security forces’ crackdown on the Amini protests had killed a total of at least 141 demonstrators, in an updated death toll on Tuesday.
The US on Wednesday placed more than a dozen Iranian officials on its sanctions blacklist for the crackdown. The White House later said it was “concerned that Moscow may be advising Iran on best practices to manage protests, drawing on ... extensive experience in suppressing” opponents.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report