At least 16 people have been shot dead this weekend by Iranian security forces in Sistan and Baluchestan province, while dozens of people have been injured in a crackdown on a protest march in Iranian Kurdistan over the killing of a Kurdish woman in the country’s capital Tehran, activist groups said Sunday.
The NGO Human Rights Iran has indicated that security forces opened fire on November 4 against a rally in the city of Jash, in Sistan and Baluchistan, the scene of another «Black Friday» after the death of nearly a hundred demonstrators on September 30 in the city of Zahedan.
Protests in the province really erupted in June after the rape of a Baloch girl by a police commissioner, but ended up feeding back into the nationwide protests that began after the death in custody of young Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini on September 16 following her arrest for wearing the traditional veil incorrectly.
Human Rights Iran now puts the death toll from the protests at 304, including 41 children, in 21 provinces across the country.
To this must be added the repression denounced this Sunday in the town of Mariwan, in Kurdistan, for the death of the student Nasrin Ghaderi, a native of this town and resident of Tehran, who on Saturday night received several blows to the head during a new protest in the capital. The woman fell into a coma and died on Saturday night.
The Iranian authorities, the family complains to the Iraqi Kurdish agency Rudaw, have forbidden the woman to be buried in her hometown. The intelligence services, according to the family’s account, forced the burial to be held practically without the presence of her relatives and loved ones.
The Kurdish human rights NGO Hengaw, based in Norway, has assured that dozens of demonstrators have been injured in Sunday’s riots and that there are fears of deaths, which could not be verified at this time.