“The blood of our young people is dripping from your fingers”: a group supporting the protest in Iran succeeded in hacking a state television channel this Saturday evening by broadcasting this message in full news. The text was accompanied by an image of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei surrounded by flames and his head in a viewfinder.
“It’s time to put away your furniture (…) and find yourself another place to install your family outside Iran,” read another message.
A claimed cyberattack
The cyberattack, which lasted a few seconds, was claimed by a group calling itself Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice) which supports the protest movement, the largest in Iran since the protests against the price hikes of gasoline in 2019.
Several foreign-based media in Persian shared a video showing the cyberattack. At the end of the video, the newscaster can be seen looking tense, his eyes fixed on the camera. In Iran, the Tasnim news agency confirmed that state television had “been hacked for a few moments by anti-revolutionary agents”.
At least 95 dead according to an NGO
Iran has been rocked by protests since the death of Mahsa Amini on September 16. The 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman died three days after her arrest by vice police in Tehran for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women, including the wearing of the veil.
The Iranian authorities, they said Friday that Mahsa Amini had died of an illness and not of “blows”. But the young woman’s father, Amjad Amini, who claimed his daughter was in good health before her arrest, dismissed the medical report in an interview with Iran International, a Persian-language television channel based in London. “I saw with my own eyes that blood had flowed from Mahsa’s ears and neck,” he said. Activists and NGOs had claimed that she had suffered a head injury during her detention.
The Oslo-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR) has reported at least 95 deaths in the crackdown on protests since September 16. According to a latest Iranian report given at the end of September, around 60 people were killed, including around ten police officers.