At least 244 people have been killed and more than 12,500 people detained in the crackdown against Iran’s street protests, the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), an Iranian human rights website tweeted on Friday.

HRANA said that 32 children have been killed in the government crackdown, while only 945 of the 12,516 detainees have been identified.

Iran’s security forces have repeatedly been accused of brutally targeting children and students at schools and universities, as well as journalists who were covering the protest that began after the alleged killing of a Kurdish-Iranian woman by religious police last month.

“Repression of people who protested with empty hands has been a daily occurrence in the last 40 years. But what happened to children and prisoners last week is one of the blackest pages in the record of the current government,” the Writers Union of Iran said in a statement according to The Guardian.

“The attack of security forces on schools and prisons and the beating and killing of children and prisoners is a tragedy beyond the killing of protesters in the streets. In this stage of repression, the government, as always, denies the reality, spreads rumours, and distorts public opinion in order to thwart the efforts of people’s organisations and groups to express the truth.”

The news comes as Major General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the notorious Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, claimed that the country’s security forces were snuffing out the last of the protests according to the UK newspaper.

Demonstrators, however, insist the protests are continuing, with truck drivers and oil unions reportedly joining the mass demonstrations calling for the end of the Iranian government.

The protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died after being arrested for allegedly wearing her headscarf ‘improperly’ in September.

Source » alaraby