Content warning: This article contains references and descriptions of sexual violence and torture. Reader discretion is advised.
Two protesters, including a child, say they were sexually assaulted by Iranian security forces who detained them in Kermanshah, the France-based Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN) reported.
“During the transfer, security forces touched their bodies with batons,” the NGO’s Rebin Rahmani told The Guardian. “They beat and applied pressure to the anal area with a baton through the clothing.”
Following previous protests, human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, said the regime uses rape, sexual violence, and torture to suppress dissent.
“Iranian security forces’ brutality against detained protesters, including rape and torture, is not only an egregious crime but a weapon of injustice wielded against detainees to coerce them into false confessions,” Nahid Naghshbandi, acting Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch, said following the deadly crackdown on the 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests.
“These methods are also a twisted and despicable means of further stigmatizing and repressing marginalized ethnic minorities.”
Iran detains children as crackdown on protests continues
KHRN independently confirmed the identities of 20 children and adolescents who were arrested in Ilam, Kermanshah, , and Kurdistan provinces.
Furthermore, at least 100 minors have been arrested in Kermanshah province, the Coordination Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Association reported.
KHRN released the names of 199 people whose fates remain unknown. The families of those arrested had complained that authorities abducted their loved ones without a judicial warrant and in a violent manner, it said.
Protesters taken from Ilam province who were transferred to the detention center in Ilam City’s prison have been deprived of legal support and subjected to torture, KHRN reported. Regime forces had stormed a local hospital there, where they detained wounded protesters and kidnapped the bodies of those killed, it said.
KHRN said it was investigating multiple reports of protesters who were murdered in detention.
Soran Feyzizadeh, 40, was tortured to death in captivity, and his family was forced to pay for the return of his body, the Hengaw human-rights group reported.
Full-scale of Iran’s human rights violations unknown as internet shutdown prevents investigations
Investigations into the well-being of protesters who were arrested, as well as alleged atrocities committed by the regime, have been disrupted by the Internet shutdown imposed by the regime.
The exact number of those murdered remains unknown, although an Iranian official on Sunday told Reuters the authorities had verified that at least 5,000 people had been killed in the protests.
“The final toll is not expected to increase sharply,” said the official, who blamed Israel and the United States for the violence.
Human-rights activists and groups have warned that masses of bodies may never be fully identified and laid to rest, similar to how Tehran unnamed victims were buried in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery following the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
In 2024, the UN’s special rapporteur said Tehran had attempted to destroy Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery to “conceal or erase data that could serve as potential evidence to avoid legal accountability” regarding its actions.
A video obtained by CNN revealed a makeshift morgue at the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center and families wailing as they attempted to identify lost loved ones among the hundreds of bodies.
Some of the bodies that were in bags had been marked unidentified, BBC Verify reported, citing footage it deemed too graphic to share.