PARIS (AFP) – Iranians staged new protest actions to denounce the country’s theocratic regime in defiance of a crackdown that is now seeing those arrested put on trial and facing the death penalty.
Iran has for the past six weeks been rocked by protests of a scale and nature unprecedented since the 1979 revolution, sparked by the death in September of Mahsa Amini who had been arrested by the Tehran morality police.
The authorities have warned protesters it is time to leave the streets but the demonstrations have shown no sign of abating, taking place in residential areas, major avenues and universities nationwide.
The challenge for the regime is compounded by the custom in Iran to mark 40 days since a person died, turning every ‘chehelom’ 40-day mourning ceremony for the dozens killed in the crackdown into a potential protest flashpoint.
Residents of the Tehran district of Ekbatan late on Monday shouted protest movement slogans with security forces using stun grenades in a bid to stop the action, according to footage posted on the 1500tasvir monitoring site and other outlets.
The Norway-based Hengaw rights organisation said the funeral in the mainly Kurdish city of Sanandaj in northwestern Iran on Monday for Sarina Saedi, a 16-year-old girl it said was killed in the crackdown, turned into a protest with anti-regime slogans shouted and women removing headscarves.
1500tasvir also posted a widely shared video on social media showing medical students protesting in the northern city of Tabriz.
Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) group said that students were yesterday staging a sit-in protest at Isfahan University while social media footage indicated a similar action was in progress at the engineering faculty of Amir Kabir university in Tehran.
