‘Enemy of God’: Iran vows death penalty for protesters as crackdown intensifies

Mass demonstrations across Iran entered their second week on Saturday with authorities conceding that unrest continues even as security forces intensify efforts to suppress the protests and the country remains largely isolated from the outside world.

The nationwide internet shutdown and disruption of phone services have made it increasingly difficult to independently assess the scale of the demonstrations. However, the Washington-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reports that at least 65 people have been killed and more than 2,300 arrested since the protests began. Iranian state television, meanwhile, has focused coverage on casualties among security personnel and projected an image of stability and control.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has indicated that tougher measures are imminent, despite warnings from the United States against further escalation. On Saturday, Iranian authorities sharpened their rhetoric, with Attorney General Mohammad Movahedi Azad declaring that participation in protests would be treated as a capital offence. In remarks broadcast by state media, he said demonstrators — as well as anyone who assisted them — would be labelled “enemies of God,” a charge that carries the death penalty under Iranian law.

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The statement urged prosecutors to move swiftly and decisively, calling for immediate indictments and uncompromising trials. It said those accused of fomenting unrest and undermining national security in alignment with foreign interests must face justice without mercy or delay, signalling a hardline approach as the government seeks to stamp out dissent.

Meanwhile, major Iranian cities were gripped overnight by new mass rallies denouncing the Islamic republic, as activists on Saturday expressed fear authorities were intensifying their suppression of the demonstrations under cover of an internet blackout.

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The two weeks of protests have posed one of the biggest challenges to the theocratic authorities who have ruled Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, although supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has expressed defiance and blamed the United States.

Rights groups have accused security forces of deliberately targeting protesters’ eyes with birdshot in previous protest waves in Iran.

Norway-based Iran Human Rights group has said at least 51 people have been killed in the crackdown so far, but warned the actual toll could be higher.

Iranian authorities are using the “most blatant tools of repression”, prize-winning filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi said, pointing to the internet blackout.

“Experience has shown that resorting to such measures is intended to conceal the violence inflicted during the suppression of protests,” they added.

More weekend demonstrations planned

Iran’s theocracy cut off the nation from the internet and international telephone calls on Thursday, though it allowed some state-owned and semiofficial media to publish. Qatar’s state-funded Al Jazeera news network reported live from Iran, but they appeared to be the only major foreign outlet able to work.

Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who called for protests Thursday and Friday, asked in his latest message for demonstrators to take to the streets Saturday and Sunday. He urged protesters to carry Iran’s old lion-and-sun flag and other national symbols used during the time of the shah to “claim public spaces as your own.”

Pahlavi’s support of and from Israel has drawn criticism in the past — particularly after the 12-day war. Demonstrators have shouted in support of the shah in some protests, but it isn’t clear whether that’s support for Pahlavi himself or a desire to return to a time before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The demonstrations began Dec. 28 over the collapse of the Iranian rial currency, which trades at over 1.4 million to $1, as the country’s economy is squeezed by international sanctions in part levied over its nuclear program. The protests intensified and grew into calls directly challenging Iran’s theocracy.

Airlines have cancelled some flights into Iran over the demonstrations. Austrian Airlines said Saturday it had decided to suspend its flights to Iran “as a precautionary measure” through Monday. Turkish Airlines earlier announced the cancellation of 17 flights to three cities in Iran.

With inputs from agencies