The New York Times:

By Erika Solomon and Kiana Hayeri

The families rooted frantically through the piles of corpses, so crammed together that the living had to take care not to step on the dead.

Wailing and cursing, they searched the body bags for the number assigned to their loved one for burial — a surreal veneer of bureaucracy imposed onto a chaotic nightmare.

But the breaking point only came when weary-looking cemetery workers arrived in refrigerated trucks to dump still more corpses on the ground. The body bags landed with sickening thuds in front of onlookers who had come to bury their children, siblings, fathers, mothers.

“That moment — it broke people. People couldn’t just watch them throwing the bodies out like that,” said Kiarash, a witness who described the scene this month at Behesht-e Zahra, the largest cemetery in Tehran. “There was a mother lying on her child’s body, begging for help so they wouldn’t throw him somewhere,” Kiarash added.

Enraged, the crowds began pushing their way into the hallway of the mortuary, cursing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — a criminal offense in the country — as security forces looked on.

“Mothers were crying, shouting,” Kiarash said. “And all the people were shouting things like, ‘Death to Khamenei.’” As Kiarash reached for his phone to film them, he said, security forces quickly stopped him. Others, however, did manage to surreptitiously film and share the protests that day, in videos that have been verified by The New York Times.

Kiarash, who, like others interviewed, asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his relatives, gave The New York Times rare, detailed testimony of his experiences during a visit to his family in Iran, which coincided with the anti-government protests that roiled the country for weeks. A violent crackdown unleashed by the government has stifled those demonstrations for now, residents say.

The staggering toll of this suppression has only begun to emerge — obscured by a government shutdown of the internet and telephone lines for more than a week. Though some communications are slowly being restored, reliable testimony and evidence is emerging piecemeal.

Human rights groups say they have gathered so many individual testimonies of people who witnessed large numbers of bodies collecting at morgues and cemeteries across the country that they expect the death toll to rise far beyond the current estimates of up to 4,500.
And, like Kiarash, three rights groups interviewed by The Times recounted shocking treatment of the dead.

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of Iran Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Oslo, said that his team had also received witness accounts of bodies being piled on top of one another in Tehran and in the coastal city of Rasht. The group documented testimonies from people who said that they had been forced to search through trucks loaded with bodies to find their loved ones in Tehran and in the northeastern city of Mashhad.

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