The Iranian security forces are targeting women who are participating in anti-regime protests with shotguns to their faces, breasts, and genitals as per the interviews of medics conducted across the country, stated a report by the Guardian.
Quoting doctors and nurses, who are treating these demonstrators in secret to avoid arrests, the report stated that the medics first observed the practice after noticing that women often arrived with different wounds to men, who more commonly had shotgun pellets in their legs, buttocks and backs.
Amid an internet blackout in the country, the medics showed the publication photos of devastating wounds all over their bodies from so-called birdshot pellets, which security forces have fired on people at close range. Some of the photos showed people with dozens of tiny “shot” balls lodged deep in their flesh.
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A physician from central Isfahan province who spoke with the publication said that he believed the authorities were targeting men and women in different ways “because they wanted to destroy the beauty of these women”.
“I treated a woman in her early 20s, who was shot in her genitals by two pellets. Ten other pellets were lodged in her inner thigh. These 10 pellets were easily removed, but those two pellets were a challenge, because they were wedged in between her urethra and vaginal opening,” the physician said.
“There was a serious risk of vaginal infection, so I asked her to go to a trusted gynaecologist. She said she was protesting when a group of about 10 security agents circled around and shot her in her genitals and thighs.”
Another doctor from Karaj, a city near Tehran, said security forces “shoot at the faces and private body parts of women because they have an inferiority complex. And they want to get rid of their sexual complexes by hurting these young people.”