Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has acknowledged for the first time that thousands of people were killed during the protests that rocked Iran over the last two weeks.
In a speech on Thursday, Khamenei said that thousands of people had been killed, “some in an inhuman, savage manner,” and blamed the US for the death toll.
The supreme leader railed against US President Donald Trump, whom he called a “criminal” for his support of the demonstrations, and called for strict punishment of protesters.
Khamenei said: “By God’s grace, the Iranian nation must break the back of the seditionists just as it broke the back of the sedition.”
Iranian authorities also released a compilation of footage on Saturday that purported to show armed individuals carrying guns and knives alongside regular protesters – evidence, they said, of foreign saboteurs.
Another senior Iranian cleric, Ali Khatami, femanded the execution of protesters, demanding that “armed hypocrites should be put to death.”
He described protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the US, vowing that neither country should “expect peace.”
Khatami, a member of the Guardian Council and a senior member of the Assembly of Experts, which appoints the supreme leader, is a hardline, influential cleric in Iran.
The speech was in striking contrast to statements from Trump, this week, who appeared to postpone a military strike in Iran, telling reporters that Iranian authorities had agreed to halt the executions of protesters.
On Friday night, Trump thanked Iran for stopping the execution of what he said was 800 protesters, though it was unclear where he was drawing those figures from.
Rights groups have said the repression of protesters is continuing, with more than 3,090 people killed in the unrest and nearly 4,000 more cases still waiting to be reviewed, according to the Human Rights Activists news agency.
More than 22,100 people have been arrested in the protests, leading to fears of mistreatment of detainees.
The two-and-a-half weeks of protests started on 28 December when traders took to the streets in Tehran,the country’s capital, in response to a sudden dip in the value of the rial.
Protests spread and demands expanded to include calls for an end to the country’s government, creating the most serious, and deadliest unrest the country has seen since the 1979 Revolution,which overthrow the pro-US Shah of Iran Pahlavi.
The brutal quashing of demonstrations by authorities, which Human Rights Watch said on Friday included the “mass killings of protesters,” has largely driven people off the streets.
With the immediate unrest addressed, authorities were making a public show of punishing those involved in the action, which they had styled as a foreign-backed plot to destabilise the country.
Khatami, in his Friday sermon, claimed 350 mosques, 126 prayer halls and 20 other places of worship had been damaged by protesters. He also said 400 hospitals, 106 ambulances, 71 fire trucks and 50 other emergency vehicles had been damaged.
It was unclear what the fallout of the protest movement will be, or if it will reignite in the coming days. Iran continues to be cut off from the rest of the world, as authorities maintain the more than week-long internet shutdown.
Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah who had become a prominent opposition voice during the protests, continued to call for the overthrow of the government on Friday and urged Trump to intervene.
“I believe the President is a man of his word,” Pahlavi said, adding that “regardless of whether action is taken or not, we as Iranians have no choice to carry on the fight.”
*PHOTO CAPTION: Ayatollah Khamenei.
