As an armada of US warships closes in on the waters surrounding Iran, a different battle is unfolding on land, largely hidden from view. Inside the country, the Iranian regime is engaged in what human rights investigators describe as an unprecedented effort to suppress evidence of mass killings carried out during nationwide protests in January. Families are being forced to pay for the bullets that killed their loved ones, doctors are arrested for treating the wounded, and medical records are altered under pressure from the state. The aim, activists say, is simple: erase the scale of the bloodshed.
According to accounts gathered by lawyers, doctors and rights groups and reported by Observer UK, officials have imposed a series of brutal conditions on grieving families. To retrieve bodies, relatives are charged so-called “bullet fees” for every round found in a corpse. Others are told they must falsely claim the dead were members of the Basij, the paramilitary wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Medics who defy orders to falsify death certificates face arrest, and in at least one case, a death sentence.
One such story has become emblematic of the cruelty of the system. In eastern Tehran, an 18-year-old protester named Mehdi was shot during demonstrations in early January. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where a doctor, attempting to save his life, issued false records to conceal the gunshot wound. When Mehdi’s mother, Farzaneh, arrived at the hospital and saw her son with a bullet lodged in his neck, she suffered a fatal heart attack. Two days later, Mehdi died from his injuries.
“The family couldn’t get his body from the hospital because security forces had detained the doctor,” said a friend of the family. Days later, officials demanded a “bullet fee” of 700m tomans, around £4,000, before releasing the body. The money was borrowed from relatives and friends. The fate of the doctor remains unknown.
Even Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has acknowledged that “thousands” were killed during the unrest. But attempts to establish an accurate death toll have hit a political red line. Mehdi Tabatabaei, a spokesperson for the office of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said authorities would release personal information on those who died in the “tragic incidents” to counter what he described as “fabrications and falsified statistics”. For investigators, the statement itself underlines the regime’s determination to control the narrative.
“This is part of a decades-long pattern of gross underestimation,” said Payam Akhavan, an Iranian-Canadian lawyer and former United Nations prosecutor. Weeks after security forces opened fire on demonstrators with machine guns, the true scale of the killings remains obscured by intimidation, censorship and fear.
Drawing on death certificates and medical evidence gathered by a covert network of doctors, forensic experts and mortuary workers across Iran, Akhavan said the data had been funnelled to a Munich-based statistician. The resulting projection estimates that as many as 33,000 people may have been killed. Akhavan stressed that the figure was intended to “raise the alarm” internationally and warned that it was likely still an undercount.
Despite an internet blackout that has cut much of Iran off from the outside world for more than two weeks, information continues to trickle out from hospitals, clinics and morgues in major cities. In provincial towns and remote areas, however, data is far harder to obtain. Activists fear the violence there may have been even more severe.
“We hear stories of a father burying his son in his garden to avoid taking him to the morgue for proper forensic examination,” Akhavan said. “That further distorts statistics.” He added that there are accounts of morgues running out of body bags and evidence of mass burials, with bodies transported in refrigerated trucks normally used to carry meat.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, head of the Iran Human Rights organisation based in Norway, said a death toll exceeding 30,000 was “not unrealistic” given the testimonies his group has received. His organisation has stopped publishing updated figures, he said, because the internet shutdown has made verification impossible. Eyewitness accounts instead point to a consistent pattern of systematic killing across some 400 cities and towns.
“The intention has been to kill as many people as possible,” Amiry-Moghaddam said. “They follow people who are fleeing and shoot them. They shoot those who are wounded and lying on the ground.” The practice of charging unaffordable bullet fees and the reported execution of a doctor who treated protesters have left families terrified of engaging with authorities, further concealing the true toll.
The number of dead may yet rise. State television has broadcast forced confessions from some of the more than 40,000 demonstrators believed to be detained. Human rights groups fear the regime could carry out mass executions in the coming weeks. The international response has been complicated by rising military tensions.
Donald Trump has repeatedly warned Tehran that harm to protesters could trigger military action. As evidence of mass killings emerged, he appeared to waver publicly while weighing his options. In the Oval Office, he said he had given Iran a deadline to strike a deal. Later, at the premiere of a documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump, he claimed to have spoken directly with Iranian officials.
“I told them: number one, no nuclear. And number two, stop killing protesters – they are killing them by the thousands,” Trump said. He added that “very big, very powerful” US ships were already sailing toward Iran and that he hoped they would not need to be used.
Behind the scenes, regional diplomacy has intensified. Turkey, fearing wider instability, has launched a flurry of talks. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has spoken with the US ambassador and hosted Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, in Ankara in an effort to avert military escalation. Araghchi rejected negotiations under threat. “Just like we are ready for negotiations, we are also ready for warfare,” he said.
For Iran’s human rights activists, however, the immediate priority is documenting the horrors of January before they vanish into silence. Families, Amiry-Moghaddam said, are under pressure as never before. “In the 18 years we have been doing this, we have never seen anything like it. They are threatening families and the lives of their children, warning them not to speak to the media or rights groups.” Yet testimonies continue to surface.
Akhavan is unequivocal in his assessment. “This has been an extermination,” he said. “The scale is such that it can legally qualify as a crime against humanity.”
