Iran has sent police into the streets in a fight to end protests that have spread to at least 15 cities, as rights groups and local media reported that up to six people had been killed in the crackdown.
There were reports of internet blackouts in parts of the country in an apparent attempt to quell the growing anger. Telecommunications Minister Issa Zarepour was quoted by the official Irna news agency as saying there had been some “temporary restrictions in some places and at some hours”.
State media reported that police used tear gas and made arrests to disperse crowds of up to 1,000 people on Tuesday evening. Irna claimed that protesters had thrown stones at security forces and set fire to police vehicles.
Protests have engulfed parts of the country over the past five days following the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by moral police for not wearing the hijab properly.
Irna said a “police assistant” died of his injuries on Tuesday in the southern city of Shiraz. And a Kurdish human rights group, Hengaw, said two more people had been killed by police, bringing the death toll since Amini’s death to six.
There were 450 other people injured and 500 arrested, the group said, figures that could not be independently verified.
The demonstrations have shaken the country. Social media has shown women cornered by men in motorcycle helmets and beaten. Many women had taken off their headscarves in protest against the moral police, who have been enforcing the hijab under a decree issued by the new leadership of President Ebrahim Raisi.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Raisi did not mention the demonstrations or Amini by name, but criticized Western countries for their reactions to “an incident that is being investigated in the “Iran.”
Iranian officials say they are conducting an investigation into the cause of Amini’s death. However, protesters have little faith in an internal investigation and want the moral policing abolished.
On Wednesday, the country’s supreme leader gave a televised speech in which he did not mention the protests but warned that young people should not “fall into the deception of Western powers”. Tehran repeatedly blames its domestic problems on the meddling of its international enemies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 83, who is the subject of persistent reports of health problems, showed no clear signs of physical frailty in a nearly hour-long address.
In New York on Tuesday, Raisi met with French President Emmanuel Macron and told him that the ongoing investigation by the UN nuclear inspectorate into the source of unexplained nuclear particles at three Iranian sites was a serious obstacle to to the reactivation of a nuclear agreement. Iran wants to stop the investigation.
Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, said he did not expect a breakthrough in the round of meetings with Iranian and US officials in New York. There is no scheduled meeting between Raisi and US President Joe Biden.
In his UN speech on Wednesday, his first as president, there was little to suggest that Raisi was willing to make new compromises to reach a deal with Washington, saying Iran needed new guarantees that the sanctions will not be imposed again. by the USA
Biden has given that assurance that as long as Iran remains in compliance with restrictions on its nuclear program, sanctions will not be reimposed, but it cannot bind future US leaders.
Raisi said the US’s “maximum pressure policy” had suffered an embarrassing defeat and that Iran would, if necessary, get its way without any renewed nuclear deal.
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He noted that Khamenei had issued a fatwa insisting that Iran had no plans to build a nuclear bomb and that its program was for purely civilian and peaceful purposes. A sharia-based fatwa was more valuable than any agreement, he said. “The Islamic Republic of Iran does not seek to build or obtain nuclear weapons and such weapons have no place in our doctrine.”
Just as he rose to speak, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, left. In an interview with CBS, Raisi stated that more research is needed to determine if the Holocaust happened.
In a 35-minute speech, one of the longest delivered to the general assembly this year, he accused the “Zionist oppressors” of building the world’s largest prison in Gaza and using seven decades of savagery to expand the settlements illegal in Palestinian land.
Raisi’s visit to New York is complicated by efforts to serve him with a writ in a civil action accusing him of torture in a case brought by three former political prisoners, including Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the British-Australian academic arrested in Iran.
You cannot be served with a writ at UN headquarters, but efforts can be made outside the building.
The case, accusing him of overseeing human rights abuses, has been filed in New York’s Southern District Court accusing Raisi of overseeing the torture and ill-treatment of three inmates.
The three plaintiffs are Moore-Gilbert, Mehdi Hajati, a former Shiraz city councillor, and Belgian-Iranian academic and former hostage Hamid Babaei.
In a message to a press conference in New York, Moore-Gilbert said that she had spent two years and three months deprived of her freedom in a totally unjust manner without any basis in fact. During his detention he said that he had “suffered physical and psychological torture that remains with me to this day… In total, I spent 12 months in solitary confinement. I was routinely subjected to cruel, degrading and humiliating treatment.”
Moore-Gilbert said she often wrote to Raisi, as head of the judiciary, explaining the denial of her basic human rights, but never received a response.