The Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has acknowledged for the first time that thousands of people were killed during the protests that rocked Iran over the last two weeks,
The Guardian reports.
In a speech on Thursday, Khamenei said that thousands of people had been killed, “some in an inhuman, savage manner”, and blamed the US for the death toll. The supreme leader railed against the US president, Donald Trump, whom he called a “criminal” for his support of demonstrations, and called for strict punishment of protesters.
Khamenei said: “By God’s grace, the Iranian nation must break the back of the seditionists just as it broke the back of the sedition.”
Iranian authorities also released a compilation of footage on Saturday that purported to show armed individuals carrying guns and knives alongside regular protesters – evidence, they said, of foreign saboteurs.
Another senior Iranian cleric demanded the execution of protesters, demanding that “armed hypocrites should be put to death”.
He described protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the US, vowing that neither country should “expect peace”.
Khatami, a member of the Guardian Council and a senior member of the Assembly of Experts, which appoints the supreme leader, is a hardline, influential cleric in Iran.
The speech was in striking contrast to statements from Trump, this week, who appeared to postpone a military strike in Iran, telling reporters that Iranian authorities had agreed to halt the executions of protesters.
On Friday night, Trump thanked Iran for stopping the execution of what he said was 800 protesters, though it was unclear where he was drawing those figures from.
Rights groups have said the repression of protesters is continuing, with more than 3,090 people killed in the unrest and nearly 4,000 more cases still waiting to be reviewed, according to the Human Rights Activists news agency. More than 22,100 people have been arrested in protests, leading to fears of mistreatment of detainees.
The two-and-a-half weeks of protests started on 28 December when traders took to the streets in Tehran in response to a sudden dip in the value of the rial. Protests spread and demands expanded to include calls for an end to the country’s government, creating the most serious, and deadliest unrest the country has seen since the 1979 revolution.
