Canada-based activist Hamed Esmaeilion, whose daughter and wife were killed by the IRGC, has called on the international community to downgrade diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic.
Esmaeilion made the plea in an interview with Iran International after the demonstrations against the Islamic Republic in Toronto on Saturday, when Iranian diaspora communities and human rights activists held unprecedented rallies in over 150 cities throughout the world.
Esmaeilion – the spokesman for the families of victims of Ukrainian flight PS752 shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in January 2020 – urged world countries to expel Tehran’s envoys. His wife and young daughter were among the 176 people onboard the airliner.
"This can be a start for Europeans and countries that have Iranian embassies to behave properly” in response to worldwide protests against the regime in Tehran, he said.
He added that the Iranians are showing the world that they do not want the Islamic Republic and that its officials do not represent the people of Iran.
Many people in Iran and abroad have been holding regular protests since the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman whose murder in the hands of hijab police has sparked an uprising. The level of unanimity and support from foreign leaders and officials as well as celebrities and well-known figures is unprecedented.
Hacker group Backdoor (3ackd0or) provided Iran International with documents about the four police officers who stopped Mahsa along with a few of his relatives in Tehran and took her to the Vozara police station in a police van. According to reports, she suffered at least one severe blow to her head that led to her death in the following hours.
Iran International has no knowledge of how they obtained this information, which cannot be independently verified.
The commander of the team was Captain Enayatollah Rafiei, 52 years old and from the town of Khodabandeh in northwestern Zanjan province.
The other male agent of the team was identified as Sergeant Ali Khoshnamvand, 27 years old and from the village of (Khoshnamvand) Khushnamvand in the Kouhdashtdistrictof Lorestan province in western Iran.
Parastou Safari is 36 years old and was born in the eastern city of Kermanshah. She is probably the female agent who deemed Mahsa’s clothing “inappropriate” and decided to take her to the station for “a short training on Islamic dress code.”
Fatemeh Ghorban-Hosseini is 27 years old, the youngest of the team that arrested Mahsa and was born and raised in the capital Tehran.
The authorities first tried to spread disinformation that Mahsa Amini had an illness which caused her death, but soon information emerged that severe blows had broken her skull and caused a coma after two hours of her arrest.
Her death almost immediately led to protests in her home province of Kordestan in Western Iran and then spread to the capital Tehran and other cities. The government resorted to brutal force against demonstrators and so far at least 150 people have died, with the largest single-day toll on September 30 in the city of Zahedan where 42 local protesters were shot.
On Thursday, September 29, Mohammad-Bagher Bakhtiar, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard during Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq, published an audio file quoting informed sources at the Forensic Medicine Organization as saying that Amini died because of a "blow to her skull".
Iran International had earlier published Mahsa's skull CT scan which showed bone fracture, hemorrhage and brain edema. The medical documents and dozens of exclusive images sent to Iran International by a hacktivist group vividly show a skull fracture on the right side of her head caused by a severe trauma to the skull, which corroborate earlier accounts by her family and doctors about her being hit several times on the head, proving that the Iranian police's claim that she suffered a heart attack was untrue.
An eyewitness told Iran International last week that Mahsa had told her in a detention room that an officer had hit her on the head.
Spearheaded by Hamed Esmaeilion, a Canada-based activist whose daughter and wife were killed by the IRGC, the Saturday worldwide demonstrations started in Australia, New Zealand and East Asia followed by European cities with cities in the American continent being the last ones to start the scheduled rallies.
Many people in Iran and abroad have been holding regular protests since the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman whose murder in the hands of hijab police has sparked an uprising. The level of unanimity and support from foreign leaders and officials as well as celebrities and well-known figures is unprecedented.
The protesters in most cities congregated outside the Islamic Republic’s embassies or consulates or main squares, chanting slogans against the Iranian regime, such as “Death to the dictator,” in reference to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and “Women, Life, Liberty,” as it is official motto of the current wave of protests.
In Australia and New Zealand, many government officials and international human rights activists attended the rallies and, in some cases, delivered speeches. At least three cities in Australia alone, namely Adelaide, Sydney, and Melbourne, were scenes of large demonstrations.
In London, a large crowd of Iranian expats gathered around Trafalgar Square to express support for Iran’s protests. "Eventhough we're far from homeland, We have your back compatriot," they chanted.
In Edinburgh, member of the Scottish parliament and the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats Alexander Geoffrey Cole-Hamilton delivered a speech in support of the ongoing protests in Iran.
The gathering in Swedish capital Stockholm and Brussels in Belgium have been very huge as the cities are home to large communities of Iranians.
During the rallies in Stockholm, Reza Younesi, whose brother Ali, a gold medalist at World Astronomy Olympiad, is jailed in Iran, called for release of all prisoners of conscience and all those unjustly detained by the Islamic Republic.
Social media platforms are exploding with video footage from today's protests in Iran as the rallies are still going on in many cities across Europe.
The protests have officially started in over a dozen cities in the Americas, most of which are in United States and Canada. Numerous speeches by prominent figures have been also scheduled.
According to different estimates, about 30 to 50 thousand people have participated in the gathering in the Canadian city of Toronto.
Niagara Falls, spanning the border between the province of Ontario in Canada and the state of New York in the United States, is planned to be illuminated for 22 minutes in memory of Mahsa, who was 22 years old when she was killed, as a visual tribute to protests.
Iran's regime faced a multi-flank attack on Saturday, with student protests turning into general unrest, and businesses going on strikes in Kurdish majority provinces and southeastern Iran as well as the bazaar in capital Tehran.
Protests and strikes at around 100 universities Saturday morning turned into street demonstrations as students left the campuses and moved into streets.
Amid escalation of protests across Iran, the heads of the three branches of the Iranian government held an emergency meeting on Saturday night while the country's parliament has scheduled a special session with top security officials including Interior Minister and Police chief in attendance to discuss protests. The meeting will be held on Sunday morning behind closed doors.