A Cardiff-based man has told Sky News that his 17-year-old cousin was shot in the heart and beaten to death during protests in Iran last week, as reports emerge of a widening, state-backed crackdown and a nationwide effort to restrict information.
Diako Haydari, speaking from Cardiff, said his cousin, Amir Ali Haydari, was killed in the western Iranian city of Kermanshah after attending demonstrations on Thursday with his classmates.
“I got the latest information from our family today. He was shot in the heart, and as he was taking his last breath, they hit him in the head with the butt of a gun so many times that his brain was scattered on the ground,” Mr Haydari told Sky News.
He said relatives were later issued a death certificate claiming Amir Ali “fell from a big height”, an assertion the family disputes.
Sky News said it had obtained footage filmed in Kermanshah on Thursday showing plainclothes police intimidating protesters and firing pistols at people on the street. Images seen by Sky News also show demonstrations later forming in the city centre, including in the area where Amir Ali was killed.
Accounts from families such as the Haydaris are emerging against a backdrop of severe restrictions on communications inside Iran. Sky News reported that the internet has been blocked and that domestic and international phone calls are now impossible. The broadcaster also said authorities have managed to disable Starlink internet receivers, which connect to the web via the satellite network owned by Elon Musk.
With outside reporting constrained, the most visible broadcast coverage inside the country is coming from state television, which Sky News said has focused on pro-government rallies.
Sky News described scenes at a government forensic centre in Kahrizak, on the outskirts of Tehran, where black plastic body bags covered the floor of a large warehouse. Men and women were shown moving among rows of bodies, searching for identifying features of missing relatives. Outside the warehouse, Sky News reported, body bags were being unloaded from pick-up trucks and larger vehicles.
The broadcaster said these scenes were likely to have been replicated nationwide amid claims of mass casualties. Human rights officials have attempted to count fatalities, Sky News reported, with one group putting the figure at around 650. The estimate has not been independently verified by Sky News in the material provided.
Mr Haydari said members of his family were told that several of Amir Ali’s friends were also hit in the violence.
“Two of Amir friends are in a coma, and they killed many of his friends. Just like him. They shot them. Many of Amir Ali’s friends are dead,” he said.
“They are savagely attacking people because they want to silence the voice of the people.”
According to the family, the number of bodies in Kermanshah was so high after the protest that authorities requisitioned two city buses to transport the dead to the morgue at Taleghani Hospital. Mr Haydari said Amir Ali’s uncle later told him the hospital held around 500 corpses, and that the family had to identify the teenager among the dead. That figure, and the account of the transport arrangements, could not be independently verified in the information provided.
For Mr Haydari in Cardiff, the death of his cousin has been both sudden and devastating, he said.
“I did not sleep last night, me and my wife did not sleep. There’s nothing we can do,” he told Sky News.
Sky News said the Iranian authorities are seeking to project normality in public, even as security forces deploy force against protesters. The broadcaster reported that the government’s efforts to contain information have not fully prevented accounts of deaths and alleged falsification of official paperwork from reaching relatives abroad.
The killing of Amir Ali Haydari, as described by his family, adds to growing concern over the treatment of teenage protesters during the unrest and the ability of families to establish what happened to loved ones amid the communications blackout.