The Iranian Revolutionary Guards massacred up to one hundred people in a single incident during a wave of protests that has roiled the country, the New York Times reported on Sunday.
Protests in Iran that began on November 15 in response to an increase in the price of gas throughout the country have been suppressed in the worst political violence the country has seen since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Between 180 and 450 people have been killed, according to human rights groups, while at least 2,000 protesters have been wounded and 7,000 detained by regime forces. Iran imposed an almost complete internet blackout across the country in response to the protests.
“The recent use of lethal force against people throughout the country is unprecedented, even for the Islamic Republic and its record of violence,” Omid Memarian, deputy director for the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, told the Times.
In one incident on November 18 in the southwest city of Mahshahr, members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps opened fire on a group of demonstrators blocking an intersection, killing some immediately. The demonstrators then fled to a nearby marsh to evade capture, while one protester apparently fired an AK-47 at the Guards.
The Guards then surrounded the marsh and gunned down as many as one hundred people, and afterwards loaded the dead onto a truck and drove away. One resident of Mahshahr told the Times the Guards returned the bodies of the dead to their families five days later, and only after the families agreed not to speak to any media or hold memorial services.
A lawmaker who represents the city in Iran’s parliament, Mohamad Golmordai, excoriated the regime in a rare moment of outrage against the government broadcast on Iranian state television.
“What have you done that the undignified Shah did not do?” Golmordai shouted on the parliament floor on November 25 during a fistfight with other lawmakers.