Baluch Man Dies Of Wounds Sustained During Zahedan’s “Bloody Friday”

A 24-year-old ethnic Baluch man has succumbed to injuries sustained during the Iranian authorities’ bloody crackdown on protesters in the eastern city of Zahedan in September, activists say.

HAALVSH, a group that monitors rights violations of the Sunni minority in Iran, said that Mansour Hormozi fell into a coma after security forces shot him in the back on September 30.

The authorities have declined to hand the body over to his family for burial, it said.

On September 30 in Zahedan, the provincial capital of Sistan and Baluchistan province, security forces killed 92 people, including 12 children, after firing live ammunition, metal pellets and teargas at protesters, bystanders and worshippers, according to IranWire sources. Four security forces were also killed that day.

The incident, dubbed Zahedan’s Black Friday, is the deadliest so far in the nationwide protests that have rocked Iran for four months.

The demonstrations sparked by the September death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of Tehran’s morality police and the state clampdown on the protest movement have been particularly intense in Iran’s western Kurdish areas and the province of Sistan and Baluchistan.

Each week on Fridays, hundreds of people are taking to the streets of Zahedan and other cities across Sistan and Baluchestan despite the heavy presence of security forces, chanting slogans against the Islamic Republic.

The impoverished province is home to Iran's Sunni Baluch minority of up to 2 million people which human rights groups say has faced discrimination and repression for decades.

More than 500 people have been killed by security forces since the eruption of the wave of protests and over 18,000 have been detained, human rights activists say. At least 100 protesters are currently at risk of “execution, death penalty charges or sentences,” according to one rights group.