Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30,000: Local Officials
time.com
According to two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health who spoke with TIME.

As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone, two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health told TIME—indicating a dramatic surge in the death toll.

So many people were slaughtered by Iranian security services on that Thursday and Friday, it overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead. Stocks of body bags were exhausted, the officials said, and eighteen-wheel semi-trailers replaced ambulances.

The government’s internal count of the dead, not previously revealed, far surpasses the toll of 3,117 announced on Jan. 21 by regime hardliners who report directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (Ministries report to the elected President.) The 30,000 figure is also far beyond tallies being compiled by activists methodically assigning names to the dead. As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.

  • abumarkey@szmer.infoEnglish
    111·
    1 day ago

    The Iranian government is a repressive band of authoritarians, and to claim so isn’t American propaganda or inflated bullshit. Iranians have repeatedly stood up against them because they’re being oppressed as they had been under the shah. Now, the exact number is infinitely hard to pinpoint because of limited information trickling out of the country like @perestroika@slrpnk.net said, but that’s a separate issue. The Iranian authorities themselves admit to a few thousand, and it’s not far-fetched that they underestimate the number.

    • hector@lemmy.todayEnglish
      38·
      20 hours ago

      Your numbers suggest inflated bullshit. More than suggest, what did you say, you assumed tens of thousands of eye injuries based on an account of hundreds in one place. In a country in effect still at war with Israel and the US.