Amidst the ongoing protest against the Iran leadership, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards opened fire on family members mourning a slain protester and seized his body from the hospital. The firing happened as clashes raged around the country overnight, AFP reported citing a rights group on Saturday.
"Last night, after IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) forces attacked Shahid Gholi Pur Hospital in Bukan, they seized Shahryar Mohammadi's body and buried him secretly," the Norway-based Hengaw rights group said.
"These forces opened fire on his family and inflicted injuries on at least five people," Hengaw, which monitors abuses in Kurdish areas, told AFP.
Hengaw said that security forces also opened fire on protesters in the town of Divandarreh, in Kurdistan province, wounding several people.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-led government is facing its biggest challenge since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in two months of protests over the death of Mahsa Amini.
Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) has said that the Iranian authorities have responded to protests with a crackdown leaving at least 342 people dead. The group added that half a dozen have already been sentenced to death and thousands more have been arrested.
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Earlier, IHR claimed that protesters were killed in 22 of Iran's 31 provinces, including 123 in Sistan-Baluchistan and 32 in Amini's home province of Kurdistan, where violence flared in the town of Bukan overnight.
Activists allege that Iran's security forces are carrying out secret burials of protesters they have killed, to prevent more violence that could flare up at their funerals.
Earlier on Wednesday, 10 people including a woman, two children, and a security officer were killed in two separate attacks in the cities of Izeh and Isfahan, informed state media and a hospital source.
According to AFP, Iran’s state news agency IRNA has earlier reported that two members of Iran's pro-government Basij paramilitary force were stabbed to death in the northeastern city of Mashhad while trying to intervene against "rioters".
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Iran has blamed Britain, Israel, and the United States for instigating violence in the country during protests since the September 16 death of Amini. In a statement, Iran's foreign ministry hit out at the "deliberate silence of foreign promoters of chaos and violence in Iran in the face of... terrorist operations in several Iranian cities".
The statement added, "It is the duty of the international community and international assemblies to condemn the recent terrorist acts in Iran and not to provide a safe haven for extremists.”
22-year-old Mahsa Amini, an Iranian of Kurdish origin, died three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police over an alleged breach of the Islamic republic's mandatory hijab law.
(With Agency Inputs)