Iranian authorities will determinedly pursue punishing anti-regime protesters, President Ebrahim Raisi said on Friday, a day after Iran carried out its first death penalty over demonstrations sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death.
At least 458 people, including 63 children and 29 women, have been killed by security forces in the protests, according to the Oslo-based rights group Iran Human Rights (IHR).
Speaking at a meeting with families of members of the security forces who have been killed in the unrest, Raisi stressed that punishing “rioters” and those behind deaths of regime agents “will be followed up with determination by the relevant institutions,” the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.
Iran carried out on Thursday its first execution over the ongoing protests in the country, hanging 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari.
Shekrai had been convicted of wounding a member of the security forces and blocking a street in Tehran, in what rights groups called a “sham trial.”
The execution has triggered global condemnation.
Protests – referred to by the regime as “riots” – have swept across Iran since September 16 when 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Amini died after her arrest by the morality police in Tehran.
Since Amini’s death, demonstrators have been calling for the downfall of the regime in a movement that has become one of the boldest challenges to the Islamic Republic since its establishment in 1979.