Videos of body bags give rare glimpse of Iran’s bloody crackdown
One man is covered with a bloody white shroud inside a body bag. Another lies nearby, his body sprawled on the tiled floor with arms raised and blood streaked across the face.
Row upon row of other bodies surround them.
“It’s horrifying. It’s the apocalypse,” says the man filming the scene in the warehouse of a forensics center near Tehran. “There are lots of bodies.”
Iran has been largely shut off from the rest of the world for days, since its regime cut the internet and severely restricted phone access after cities across the country erupted in anger sparked by the crash of the currency against the U.S. dollar and soaring inflation. Videos that have trickled out and circulated online offer a window into the resulting crackdown in the Islamic Republic and the methods employed by security forces to quell the unrest.
The images, circulated on social media this week and geolocated by NBC News, show more than 200 bodies piled in the makeshift morgue outside the capital, machine guns fired at crowds, and clashes in cities from Urmia in the northwest to Isfahan in the heart of the country.
At least 2,500 people have been killed, according to the the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency. Authorities have not given an official death toll.
Most tallies placed the number of protesters killed before the internet blackout Thursday at around 40, with rights groups and activists suggesting that Thursday and Friday nights saw the crackdown intensify into scenes not witnessed in the country for decades.
Two videos from Tehran, which circulated online Monday, show the tactics employed by security forces.
In one, a man wearing a helmet with a visor can be seen firing a machine gun at a crowd of people about 30 yards away across a square. The muzzle of the machine gun flares in the night as the man sprays automatic fire.
In another, shots ring out near a police station as protesters can be heard chanting, “Death to Khamenei,” a reference to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the highest authority in the country. As the crowd chants largely out of sight, heavy automatic gunfire can be heard for 15 uninterrupted seconds.
A group of security forces then comes into view from the right side of the screen and a member of the security forces aims and fires a pistol. A short while later, a person or body is dragged into the police station, though it is not clear who this person is. Several members of the security forces in riot gear on motorcycles then drive into the police station.
About 5 miles south of the capital’s southern suburbs, the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center has offered perhaps the clearest sign of the crackdown’s intensity.
Videos from the site, which became a makeshift morgue, first circulated over the weekend. Two more separate videos, which appear to have been shot by one person, circulated Tuesday.
Outside the warehouse, the man filming the scene at Kahrizak walks up to a woman in a lab coat with a black headscarf who is writing in a notebook next to a man’s blood-soaked body. The body has been partially removed from a black body bag placed on dirt.
A man in a black T-shirt and black pants wearing gloves holds the body on its side and positions the bloody head for the medical official to get a better glimpse at the wound.
“Was he hit in the head?” the person filming asks. Another man nearby replies: “Yes.”
The same woman, whom one man calls doctor, walks up to the back of an ambulance and asks why a body is still in the vehicle.
“Because there was no more space left on the ground,” a man replies, his voice cracking. “It’s a woman, it’s my sister.”
Nearby, a man in a blue medical smock and orange gloves examines the head of a man’s body that is stripped down to white underwear and pulled out of a black covering. “They hit him from behind,” a man says, as another person nearby can be heard sobbing.
