PARIS: Iranian security forces opened fire on protesters who massed in their thousands on Wednesday in Mahsa Amini’s hometown to mark 40 days since her death, according to a rights group and verified videos.

Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died on Sept 16, three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police for allegedly breaching the Islamic dress code for women.

Anger flared at her funeral and quickly sparked widespread protests that saw young women lead the charge, burning their headscarves and confronting security forces, in the biggest wave of unrest in the Islamic republic for years.

Despite heightened security measures, columns of mourners had poured into Saqez in the western Kurdistan province to pay tribute to Amini at her grave at the end of the traditional mourning period.

In a viral picture of the scene verified, a young woman was seen standing on the roof of a car without a hijab head covering, looking into the distance at the highway packed with scores of vehicles and mourners.

“Death to the dictator,” mourners chanted at the Aichi cemetery outside Saqez, before many were seen heading to the governor’s office in the city centre, where Iranian media outlets said some were poised to attack an army base.

“Security forces have shot tear gas and opened fire on people in Zindan square, Saqez city,” Hengaw, a Norway-based group that monitors rights violations in Iran’s Kurdish regions, said without specifying whether there were any dead or wounded.

Iran’s ISNA news agency said the internet had been cut in Saqez for “security reasons”, and that nearly 10,000 people had gathered in the city. But many thousands more were seen making their way in cars, on motorbikes and on foot along a highway, through fields and even across a river, in videos widely shared online.

Noisily clapping, shouting and honking car horns, mourners packed the highway linking Saqez to the cemetery eight kilometres (five miles) away, in images that Hengaw said it had verified.

ISNA said some of the crowd returning from the cemetery had “intended to attack an army base”, until they were dispersed by other participants.

A police checkpoint was torched and fires burned along a bridge in the Qavakh neighbourhood of Saqez, in a verified video.

“This year is the year of blood, Seyed Ali will be toppled,” a group of them chanted in a video verified, referring to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the graveyard of fascists,” others were heard singing in a video shared by activists on Twitter.

Published in Dawn, October 27th, 2022