After dark, Iran security forces take aim at protest buildings

Paris – Iranian security forces targeted a hospital and a student dormitory overnight, a rights group said Saturday, as a protest movement that flared over Mahsa Amini’s death entered a seventh week.

Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died in custody after her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of Iran’s strict dress rules for women based on Islamic sharia law.

Security forces have struggled to contain the women-led protests that have evolved into a broader campaign to end the Islamic republic founded in 1979.

“Death to the dictator,” mourners chanted Saturday at a ceremony to mark 40 days since the slaying of a protester in the western city of Divandarreh, using a slogan aimed at supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Rights groups say riot police shot Mohsen Mohammadi, 28, during protests in Divandarreh on September 19, and he died the next day at Kausar hospital in the flashpoint western city of Sanandaj.

Dozens of people who had gathered outside the same hospital late Friday to protect another wounded protester came under fire from the security forces, the Hengaw rights group said.

“People who had gathered in front of the Kausar Sanandaj hospital to defend Ashkan Mrwati were shot at by repressive forces,” said the Norway-based organisation.

“These forces want to capture Ashkan Mrwati while he is injured,” it said, before tweeting an image it said was of him lying on a gurney and responding to a medic.

– Students resume protests –

Soon after, Hengaw said, the same security forces also “fired at the nearby student dorm” of the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences.

In online footage verified by AFP, security forces are seen arriving on more than a dozen motorbikes before shooting up into the dormitory building.

In other verified footage, security forces are seen firing tear gas late Friday into a residential block in the Tehran neighbourhood of Chitgar where a massive protest was held the night before.

Students resumed protests on Saturday at universities in the capital Tehran, Kerman in southern Iran and the western city of Kermanshah, among others, in videos widely shared online.

Female students chanting on a street in Kermanshah in the morning came under fire from the security forces, wounding some of them, including two critically, Hengaw said.

The demonstrations have continued despite a crackdown that the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group said Friday had killed at least 160 protesters, including more than two dozen children.

At least another 93 people were killed during separate protests that erupted on September 30 in the southeastern city of Zahedan over the reported rape of a teenage girl by a police commander, IHR says.

Worshippers in Zahedan came under automatic gunfire again Friday as they emerged from weekly prayers, according to the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency.

At least 20 security personnel have been killed in the Amini protests, and at least another eight in Zahedan, according to an AFP tally based on official reports.

– ‘CIA plot’ –

IHR called for “diplomatic pressure” on Iran to be stepped up, with its director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam warning of a “serious risk of mass killings of protesters which the UN is obligated to prevent”.

The latest Amini protests were held in defiance of warnings from Khamenei and ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi.

Both have sought to link the protests to a mass shooting Wednesday at a key Shiite Muslim shrine in the southern city of Shiraz, that state media said killed at least 15 worshippers.

But the protests triggered by Amini’s death on September 16 show no signs of dwindling, inflamed by public outrage over the crackdown that has cost the lives of many other young women and girls.

The Iranian authorities staged rallies on Friday in Tehran and other cities to denounce the Shiraz attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State group.

In a joint statement, Iran’s intelligence ministry and the intelligence services of the Revolutionary Guards accused the US’s Central Intelligence Agency of plotting against the country.

The CIA had been conspiring with spy agencies in Israel, Britain and Saudi Arabia “to spark riots” in Iran and set up networks of “accomplices” among other acts, said the statement published by Iranian media outlets.