Hundreds killed in brutal crackdown on protests in Iran: BBC obtains photos

Many of the victims were so disfigured that they were unrecognizable, and 69 people were labeled in Persian as John or Jane Doe, indicating that their identities were unknown at the time the photographs were taken.

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Photo: BBC
Photo: BBC
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Warning: The text contains details that may be disturbing.

Hundreds of photographs showing the faces of people killed during violent suffocation anti-government protests in Iran were secretly provided to the BBC fact-finding team.

The images, too disturbing to publish without blurring, show the bloody, swollen and bruised faces of at least 326 victims, including 18 women.

The photographs, displayed at a morgue in southern Tehran, are one of the few ways families have been able to identify their loved ones who died.

Many of the victims were so disfigured that they were unrecognizable, and 69 people were labeled in Persian as John or Jane Doe, indicating that their identities were unknown at the time the photographs were taken.

Only 28 victims had their names clearly visible on the photographs.

The names of more than 100 victims, whose dates of death are recorded, are inscribed with January 9th - one of the deadliest nights for protesters in Tehran to date.

During clashes with security forces, the streets of Tehran burned, and protesters chanted slogans against Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei i Islamic Republic.

These mass demonstrations followed calls Pahlavi's Reze, the son of the late Shah (king) who lives in exile.

The secretly supplied photographs provide a brief insight into the situation and the number of victims, and it is believed that the Iranian authorities killed thousands of people.

The BBC fact-finding team is monitoring the spread protests in Iran since they started in late December, but because of almost complete internet outage, which was shut down by the authorities, it is extremely difficult to document the scale of the violence that the authorities carry out against those who oppose them.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly acknowledged that several thousand people had been killed, but blamed the United States, Israel and those he called "rebels and instigators of the overthrow of the government."

Although the internet outage has been going on for three weeks, a small number of people have managed to transmit certain information.

Hundreds of close-up photographs of the victims, taken at the Kahrizak Forensic Medicine Centre, were secretly provided to the BBC fact-finding team.

We analyzed 392 photos of victims and managed to identify 326 people, and for some there were multiple photos because they were taken from different angles.

Sources claim that the actual number of bodies in the morgue is measured in the thousands.

One source, whose name we are not publishing for his safety, told us that he was not prepared for what he saw in the morgue, and that he saw victims ranging in age from just 12 or 13 years old to people in their sixties and seventies.

"It was just too much," the source said.

Amid the chaos in the morgue, family members and friends were, we were told, huddled around a single screen.

They tried to recognize their loved ones as hundreds of photos of the dead flashed across the screen.

Watch the video from Iran: A row of bodies in black bags

The display of photos of the victims lasted for hours, sources say.

The injuries of many of the victims were so serious and severe that they could not be recognized, they added.

One man's face was so swollen that his eyes were barely visible.

The second man was photographed while still having a breathing tube in his mouth, indicating that he died after receiving medical attention.

We were told that some victims were so badly injured that their families asked to see the photos again and have their faces further enlarged to make sure it was really them.

In some cases, people would immediately recognize their loved ones and collapse to the floor, screaming, sources say.

Many photos show open body bags with pieces of paper near the faces with the name, ID number or date of death written on them.

We were told that in some cases the only means of identification was a bank card placed on top of the body bag.

The BBC fact-finding team has independently verified the authenticity of videos from the same morgue showing violence perpetrated against protesters.

One shows a body that appears to belong to a child, while the other shows a man with a clear gunshot wound to the middle of his head.

Both recordings are too disturbing to post.

Some Iranians publish the names of people killed by security forces when they manage to connect to the internet via Starlink or even using the networks of neighboring countries, although such occasions are extremely rare.

We checked the names of the victims identified at the morgue and compared them with social media posts listing the names of the victims and found five matches, but we are not releasing the names because we are unable to contact the victims' families.

Based on verified video footage, the BBC's fact-finding team has tracked the spread of anti-government protests in 71 cities across Iran since they began on December 28, although the actual number of places where demonstrations have taken place is likely much higher.

Several images that people were able to send via Starlink show burnt-out cars abandoned on the streets, while verified videos show bursts of gunfire during protests across Tehran.

Due to the internet outage, it is extremely difficult to identify and document all the victims of the protests.

However, Activists for Human Rights in Iran, a US-based non-governmental organization, currently estimates that more than 4.000 people have been killed.

Watch the video: Who is Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran?

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