Iranian agents blocked care for wounded anti-regime protesters at hospitals, doctors say |
BEIRUT (AP) — As wounded anti-government protesters poured into an Iranian hospital during last month’s crackdown, a young doctor hurried to the emergency room to help treat a man in his 40s who had been shot in the head at close range.
When the doctor and others tried to resuscitate the man, a group of armed, plainclothes security agents blocked their way, pushing some back with their rifles, the doctor told The Associated Press.
“They surrounded him and didn’t allow us to move further,” the doctor in the northern city of Rasht said.
Minutes later, the man was dead. The agents put his body in a black body bag. Later, they piled it and other bodies into the back of a van and drove away.
This wasn’t an isolated incident.
Over the course of a few days in early January, plainclothes Iranian agents in multiple cities swarmed hospitals that were treating the thousands wounded by Iranian security forces who fired on crowds to quash massive protests against the 47-year-old Islamic Republic. These agents monitored and sometimes obstructed care to protesters, intimidated staff, seized protesters and took away the dead in body bags. Dozens of doctors were arrested.
This story is based on Associated Press interviews with three doctors in Iran and six Iranian medical professionals living abroad who are in contact with colleagues on the ground; reports from human rights groups; and AP’s verification of more than a dozen videos posted on social media. All of the doctors inside Iran spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The AP worked with Mnemonic, a Berlin-based organization that focuses on digital information related to human rights, to identify online videos, posts and other material relating to violence in hospitals.
The doctors in Iran and abroad said the level of brutality and militarization of health facilities was unprecedented in a country that for decades has experienced crackdowns on dissent and surveillance of public institutions.
The Iran Human Rights Center, based in Oslo, has documented multiple accounts from inside hospitals of security agents preventing medical care, removing patients from ventilators, harassing doctors and detaining protesters who took part in the mass anti-regime demonstrations.
The crackdown on the demonstrations, which reached its height on January 8 and 9, was the deadliest since the Islamic Republic took power in 1979. Details have been slow to emerge because of internet restrictions imposed by authorities.
The Human Rights........