BBC:

A BBC News Persian analysis of hundreds of videos and photographs taken during recent protests in Iran confirms the security forces' use of a wide range of weaponry, including machine guns, sniper rifles and shotguns.

Protesters were reportedly killed in many of the more than 200 cities where protests had been recorded. While the exact death toll remains unclear, the level of brutality and the deployment of lethal weaponry evidenced in pictures, witness accounts and reports by human rights groups and the media show thousands have been killed across the country.

The crackdown on protests - which began over the economy but rapidly escalated - employed a level of violence unprecedented in modern Iranian history.

"This is the largest mass killing in contemporary Iranian history and one of the largest in the world," Payam Akhavan, an Iranian Canadian former UN prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, told BBC News Persian.

The Iranian government has blamed the killings on "rioters and terrorists".

But BBC News Persian analysis shows security forces used a number of different weapons on protesters, including:

machine guns
sniper rifles
assault rifles
shotguns
handguns
pellet-firing paintball guns
tear gas
machetes
knives
batons
large wooden clubs
green laser sights and pointers (for blinding and targeting)

Go to link