Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made his first public statement Monday on the biggest protests in Iran for years. He broke weeks of silence to condemn them and accuse the United States and Israel of planning what he described as “riots.”
Khamenei described as a “sad incident” that “broke our hearts” the event that triggered protests across the country, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in detention by the Iranian morality police. However, he harshly condemned the protests as a foreign plot to destabilize Iran.
“The riots were planned,” he told members of the Tehran police. “I say clearly that these riots were engineered by the United States, the Zionist regime and their employees.”
Khamenei alluded to protesters ripping off mandatory veils and setting fire to mosques, banks and police cars. He said such actions “are not normal, they are unnatural.”
Protests across the country sparked by Amini’s death are going on for three weeks, despite government efforts to quell them.
Iranian state television has reported that as many as 41 people may have been killed in violent clashes between protesters and security agents, but international observers put higher figures.
London-based Amnesty International said it had identified 52 victims, including five women and at least five children. The number of detainees is unknown. Local authorities have reported at least 1,500 arrests. And they have accused foreign countries and Iranian opposition groups in exile of fomenting discontent.
The outrage over Amani’s death has added to a long list of problems in Iran, including rising food prices, high unemployment and social restrictions, among others. Demonstrations have continued both in Tehran and in more remote provinces, despite authorities restricting access to foreign websites and blocking social media apps.
Iranian universities have seen protests in which crowds of students cheered, sang and burned hijabs “Don’t call it a protest, now it’s a revolution,” students at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University exclaimed as several women took off their headscarves to set them on fire protesting Iran’s law requiring women to cover their heads. hair.
Associated Press/OnCuba.
