Oct 29 (Reuters) – The head of Iran’s highly effective Revolutionary Guards warned protesters that Saturday can be their last day of taking to the streets, within the clearest signal that safety forces might intensify their fierce crackdown on nationwide unrest.
Iran has been gripped by protests because the dying of 22-year-old Kurdish girl Mahsa Amini within the custody of the morality police last month, posing one of the boldest challenges to the clerical management because the 1979 revolution.
“Do not come to the streets! Today is the last day of the riots,” Guards commander Hossein Salami stated in some of the hardest language used within the disaster, which Iran’s leaders blame on its overseas enemies together with Israel and the United States.
“This sinister plan, is a plan hatched … in the White House and the Zionist regime,” Salami stated. “Don’t sell your honour to America and don’t slap the security forces who are defending you in the face.”
Iranians have defied such warnings all through the favored revolt by which girls have performed a outstanding position. There have been extra stories of recent bloodshed and renewed protests on Saturday.
Human rights group Hengaw reported safety forces taking pictures college students at a women’ college within the metropolis of Saqez. In one other submit, it stated safety forces opened hearth on college students at Kurdistan University of Medical Science, within the Kurdistan provincial capital of Sanandaj.
Several college students have been injured, one of them shot within the head, Hengaw stated. Reuters couldn’t confirm the report.
PROTESTERS ON TRIAL
The extensively feared Revolutionary Guards, an elite pressure with a observe file of crushing dissent which stories on to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, haven’t been deployed since demonstrations started last month.
But the warning by Salami suggests Khamenei may unleash them within the face of relentless demonstrations now centered on toppling the Islamic Republic.
Videos posted on social media by activist teams purported to point out protests at a quantity of universities throughout the nation in cities together with Kerman, Mashhad, Qazvin, Ahvaz, Arak, Kermanshah, Yazd and a dozen campuses within the capital, Tehran.
The activist HRANA information company posted a video which it stated confirmed protests at a college holding palms in a big circle and chanting: “If we don’t unite, we will be killed one by one.”
HRANA stated 272 protesters had been killed within the unrest as of Friday together with 39 minors. Some 34 members of the safety pressure have been additionally killed. Nearly 14,000 individuals have been arrested in protests in 129 cities and cities and a few 115 universities, it stated.
A hardline Revolutionary Court started the trials of some of the 315 protesters charged to date in Tehran, no less than 5 of whom are accused of capital offences, the official information company IRNA reported.
The defendants embrace a person accused of hitting and killing a police officer along with his automotive and injuring 5 others, IRNA stated. He is charged with “spreading corruption on earth”, an offence punishable by dying below Iran’s Islamic legal guidelines.
Another man is charged with the capital offence of “moharebeh” – an Islamic time period which means warring towards God – for allegedly attacking police with a knife and serving to set hearth to a authorities constructing in a city close to Tehran, IRNA added.
The courtroom is headed by Abolghassem Salavati, a choose on whom the United States imposed sanctions in 2019 after accusing him of having punished Iranian residents and twin nationals for exercising their freedoms of speech and meeting.
Salami issued his warning to protesters as he spoke at a funeral for victims killed in an assault this week claimed by Islamic State.
A person who stated he carried out the assault, which killed 15 worshippers on the Shah Cheragh shrine within the metropolis of Shiraz, appeared pledging allegiance to the militant group in a video posted on its Telegram account on Saturday.
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Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Helen Popper and Frances Kerry
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