Iran security forces fire on protester's family

Iranian Revolutionary Guards opened fire on family members mourning a slain protester and seized his body from hospital, as clashes raged around the country overnight, a rights group said Saturday.

The country’s clerical leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is facing its biggest challenge since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in two months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini.

The authorities have responded with a crackdown that Olso-based group Iran Human Rights says left dead at least 342 people, half a dozen already sentenced to death and thousands more arrested.

Protesters have been killed in 22 of Iran’s 31 provinces, IHR said Wednesday, including 123 in Sistan-Baluchistan and 32 in Mahsa Amini’s home province of Kurdistan, where violence flared in the town of Bukan overnight.

Activists accuse Iran’s security forces of carrying out secret burials of protesters they have killed, to prevent more violence from flaring at their funerals.

Security force also opened fire on protesters in the town of Divandarreh, in Kurdistan province, wounding several people, Hengaw said on Saturday.

Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police over an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s mandatory hijab law.

On Wednesday, 10 people including a woman, two children and a security officer were killed in two separate attacks in the cities of Izeh and Isfahan, according to state media and a hospital source.

Two members of Iran’s pro-government Basij paramilitary force were stabbed to death in the northeastern city of Mashhad while trying to intervene against “rioters,” according to state news agency IRNA.