Hackers supporting Iran’s wave of women-led protests interrupted a state TV news broadcast with an image of gun-sight crosshairs and flames over a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in footage widely shared online on Sunday.
In other anti-regime messages, advocates have spray-painted “death to Khamenei” and “the police are the murderers of the people” on billboards in Tehran.
“The blood of our youths is on your hands,” read an on-screen message that flashed up briefly during the TV broadcast on Saturday evening, as street protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, again rocked Tehran and other cities.
Photo by Twitter / @EdalateAli1400 / AFP
“Police forces used tear gas to disperse the crowds in dozens of locations in Tehran,” the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reported, adding that the demonstrators “chanted slogans and set fire to and damaged public property, including a police booth.”
Anger has flared since the death of Amini on Sept. 16, three days after she was arrested by the notorious morality police for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s strict dress code for women.
“Join us and rise up,” read another message in the TV hack claimed by the group Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice).
It also posted pictures of Amini and three other women killed in the crackdown that has claimed at least 95 lives, Norway-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said.
Another 90 people were killed in Iran’s far southeast, in unrest on Sept. 30 sparked by the alleged rape of a teenage girl by a police chief in Sistan-Baluchestan Province, IHR said, citing the UK-based Baluch Activists Campaign.
An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member was killed on Saturday in Sanandaj, and a member of the guard’s Basij paramilitary force died in Tehran from “a serious head injury following an armed attack by a mob,” IRNA said — in killings that raised the death toll among security forces to 14.
Iran has been torn by the biggest wave of social unrest in almost three years, which has seen protesters including university students and even young schoolgirls chant “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
In Amini’s hometown of Saqez in Kurdistan Province, schoolgirls chanted and marched down a street waving their hijab headscarves in the air, in videos the Hengaw rights group said were recorded on Saturday.
Gruesome footage has emerged from the state’s often bloody response, spread online despite widespread Internet outages and blocks on all the major social media platforms.
One video shows a man who was shot dead at the wheel of his car in Sanandaj, Kurdistan’s capital, where the province’s police chief, Ali Azadi, later charged he was “killed by anti-revolutionary forces.”
Angry men then appear to take revenge on a member of the feared Basij militia, swarming him and beating him badly, in another widely shared video.
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