Amnesty International has released a comprehensive report documenting how Iranian state machinery systematically crushed the 2022 uprising between September 2022 and early 2023, killing at least 377 people and subjecting grieving families to a coordinated campaign of coercion, intimidation, and forced narratives.
UN says Iran crackdown amounted to crimes against humanity. The state machinery deployed everything from the Intelligence Ministry and police crowd-control units to the judiciary officials and provincial Friday prayer leaders.
The Corpse as Hostage and the Anatomy of Forced Narratives
Bodies of the slain were routinely withheld as leverage, returned to families only after relatives capitulated and accepted state-sanctioned falsehoods regarding the cause of death. Security forces systematically attributed unlawful killings to “rioters,” “counter-revolutionary groups,” “terrorists,” the opposition Mojahedin-e Khalq, suicide, illness, an accident or drug use.
The human cost of this bureaucratic cruelty played out in harrowing detail across Iran’s provinces. Authorities escorted Fuad Ghadimi’s father to the state broadcaster on September 19, 2022, just hours after his son lost his life in Kordestan province’s Divandarreh. They forced him to make false statements on air under explicit threats of withholding his son’s body and endangering his other children.
Similar tactics unfolded in Kermanshah, where Ardalan Ghasemi was shot on November 10 while writing slogans on a wall. Hospital officials threatened to keep his body in the morgue for months—demonstrating their resolve by showing the family a decomposed corpse—before releasing Ghasemi only after signing a false statement that he had been killed while stealing a car.
Targeting Women, Funerals, and the Language of Death Certificates
The authorities played down women’s deaths to stop them becoming symbols. In Mahabad, in West Azarbaijan province, four agents dressed as nurses tried to take the body of Fereshteh Ahmadi secretly out of the hospital. When her relatives intervened to stop them, an agent pointed a firearm directly at her husband’s head and threatened his life.
Burial sites turned into secondary conflict zones. In Bukan, when security agents tried to seize the body of Shahriar Mohammadi, his brother threw himself over the corpse, absorbing repeated blows to the head and a close-range birdshot wound to the leg. The family never received a written report or even a burial certificate. Following the seizure of the ambulance transporting his remains to an unannounced location, relatives were forced to carry out a nocturnal burial in total isolation.
Hospitals, morgues, and coroners’ offices functioned as administrative accomplices. Hasty burials bypassed legal autopsy mandates. When forensic evaluations did occur, families were usually denied the results. The coroner told the family of Hooman Abdollahi, shot directly in the heart in Sanandaj, his cause of death only verbally.
Systemic Impunity and the Hollow Promise of Justice
Mehran Samak in Bandar Anzali and Sepehr Beiranvand in Khorramabad experienced identical judicial trajectories: initial guilty verdicts that were subsequently reversed, sending both files back for further examination. Samak was shot after honking his car horn in solidarity with people celebrating Iran’s World Cup defeat to the United States.
Following direct intervention from Revolutionary Guards commanders and the Friday prayer leader in Malard, the offense was downgraded from intentional homicide to accidental killing, resulting in a three-year prison sentence for the perpetrator.
Similarly, the crackdown in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan and Baluchestan province, where security forces killed at least 87 people on September 30, 2022, ended with prison sentences for a few low-ranking officers. All the commanders were acquitted.
