Ali
Khamenei says thousands killed in Iran protests, some in ‘inhuman, savage
manner’
Supreme
leader blames US for death toll and calls Donald Trump a criminal for support
of demonstrations
William
Christou
Sat 17
Jan 2026 16.02 GMT
The
Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has acknowledged for the first
time that thousands of people were killed during the protests that rocked Iran
over the last two weeks.
In a
speech on Thursday, Khamenei said that thousands of people had been killed,
“some in an inhuman, savage manner”, and blamed the US for the death toll. The
supreme leader railed against the US president, Donald Trump, whom he called a
“criminal” for his support of demonstrations, and called for strict punishment
of protesters.
Khamenei
said: “By God’s grace, the Iranian nation must break the back of the
seditionists just as it broke the back of the sedition.”
Iranian
authorities also released a compilation of footage on Saturday that purported
to show armed individuals carrying guns and knives alongside regular protesters
– evidence, they said, of foreign saboteurs.
Another
senior Iranian cleric demanded the execution of protesters, demanding that
“armed hypocrites should be put to death”.
He
described protesters as “butlers” and “soldiers” of Israel and the US, vowing
that neither country should “expect peace”.
Khatami,
a member of the Guardian Council and a senior member of the Assembly of
Experts, which appoints the supreme leader, is a hardline, influential cleric
in Iran.
The
speech was in striking contrast to statements from Trump, this week, who
appeared to postpone a military strike in Iran, telling reporters that Iranian
authorities had agreed to halt the executions of protesters.
On Friday
night, Trump thanked Iran for stopping the execution of what he said was 800
protesters, though it was unclear where he was drawing those figures from.
Rights
groups have said the repression of protesters is continuing, with more than
3,090 people killed in the unrest and nearly 4,000 more cases still waiting to
be reviewed, according to the Human Rights Activists news agency. More than
22,100 people have been arrested in protests, leading to fears of mistreatment
of detainees.
The
two-and-a-half weeks of protests started on 28 December when traders took to
the streets in Tehran in response to a sudden dip in the value of the rial.
Protests spread and demands expanded to include calls for an end to the
country’s government, creating the most serious, and deadliest unrest the
country has seen since the 1979 revolution.
The
brutal quashing of demonstrations by authorities, which Human Rights Watch said
on Friday included the “mass killings of protesters”, has largely driven people
off the streets.
With the
immediate unrest addressed, authorities were making a public show of punishing
those involved in the action, which they had styled as a foreign-backed plot to
destabilise the country.
Khatami,
in his Friday sermon, claimed 350 mosques, 126 prayer halls and 20 other places
of worship had been damaged by protesters. He also said 400 hospitals, 106
ambulances, 71 fire trucks and 50 other emergency vehicles had been damaged.
It was
unclear what the fallout of the protest movement will be, or if it will
reignite in the coming days. Iran continues to be cut off from the rest of the
world, as authorities maintain the more than week-long internet shutdown.
Reza
Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran who had become a prominent opposition
voice during the protests, continued to call for the overthrow of the
government on Friday and urged Trump to intervene.
“I
believe the president is a man of his word,” Pahlavi said, adding that
“regardless of whether action is taken or not, we as Iranians have no choice to
carry on the fight”.
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