Iranian officials have been accused of stealing the bodies of protesters from hospitals and morgues.
The grieving families of the murdered demonstrators described it as a troubling new kind of intimidation.
The United Nations has already issued warnings that Iranian authorities have refused to release bodies or have made their release conditional on the relatives’ silence.
Iran has refuted claims that it has violated the human rights of demonstrators, and it has charged Western countries with inciting “peaceful assemblies into rioting and violence.”
An Iranian dissident journalist named Reza Haghighatnejad spent years in Prague working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is supported by the United States. In October, he passed away from cancer in a Berlin hospital.
His remains were not discovered at the airport when his body was taken back to Iran at his family’s request.
Since the start of the protests, at least 448 individuals, including 60 children, have died, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights; however, the actual number is likely higher due to the difficulty in obtaining death certificates.
For the families, who were unable to say goodbye to their loved ones, the seizures have been very upsetting.
The late journalist’s sister, Sarah Haghighatnejad, shared a video of her brother’s gravestone covered in flowers on Twitter. “Those who were even afraid of your lifeless body and did not give my mother and me a chance to say goodbye must pay the price,” she noted.
“They are taking away the chance from the mourning families to say goodbye in peace to have the last word with their loved ones,” Mehdi Tajik, a journalist and friend of Haghighatnejad, said. “They seize bodies to force the families to either say they were not killed by the police or to force them to bury them without a funeral.”
Some families have reacted by holding onto their deceased loved ones or rushing to the morgues where they are being housed.
In Anzali, a port city in the north of the country, protesters were celebrating Iran’s World Cup defeat to the United States when one of them, Mehran Samak, was shot and killed.
After Samak passed away, his family hurried to retrieve his remains from the mortuary out of concern that the authorities could secretly bury him somewhere else.
Kian Piraflak, 10, was shot and killed in Izeh, Khuzestan Province, earlier this month. His family reportedly chose to keep his remains at home rather than in a mortuary out of concern that they would be seized.
Videos of ladies carrying buckets of ice while yelling “Ice! Ice for children” have gone viral on social media as a symbol of the suffering endured by families to preserve and protect the bodies of their dead loved ones.
“She was forced to make a mobile morgue for the body of her child,” an Iranian journalist with knowledge of the alleged thefts told ABC News.
For reasons of safety, the journalist declined to give his or her name. “The fact that a mother cannot even think about seeking justice for the murder of her son, and instead she has to send people around to borrow ice so she can keep the body of her son cold overnight is pure horror and distress.”
According to analysts in Iran, the protests, which have brought together a wide range of Iranians, present the regime with its greatest challenge since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In response, the government launched a brutal crackdown that resulted in hundreds of injuries or fatalities and thousands of further arrests.
