Iranian agents obstructed care at hospitals packed with wounded protesters

BEIRUT — As injured anti-government protesters streamed into an Iranian hospital during last month’s crackdown, a young doctor rushed to the emergency room to help treat a man in his 40s who had been shot in the head at close range.

When the doctor and others tried to resuscitate the man, a group of armed and plainclothes security officers blocked their way, pushing some back with their rifles, the doctor told The Associated Press.

“They surrounded him and did not allow us to advance further,” said the doctor from the northern city of Rasht.

A few minutes later, the man was dead. Officers placed his body in a black body bag. They later piled him and other bodies into the back of a van and drove away.

This was not an isolated incident.

For a few days in early January, plainclothes officers swarmed hospitals in several cities to treat thousands injured by Iranian security forces who fired on crowds to suppress massive protests against the 47-year-old Islamic Republic. These officers monitored and sometimes obstructed the care of protesters, intimidated staff, arrested protesters, and carted away the dead in body bags. Dozens of doctors have been arrested.

This story is based on AP interviews with three doctors in Iran and six Iranian medical professionals living abroad who are in contact with colleagues on the ground; reports from human rights groups; and AP’s verification of more than a dozen videos posted on social media. All doctors in Iran spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The AP worked with Mnemonic, a Berlin-based organization, to identify videos, posts and other online materials related to hospital violence.

Doctors in Iran and abroad said the level of brutality and militarization of health facilities was unprecedented in a country with a decades-long history of repression of dissent and surveillance of public institutions. In at least one case, snipers on the roof of a hospital in the northern city of Gorgan fired at approaching patients, according to witness testimony provided by IIPHA, a U.S.-based association of Iranian medical professionals.

The Oslo-based Iranian Center for Human Rights has documented several accounts from hospitals that security officers prevented medical care, removed patients from ventilators, harassed doctors and arrested protesters.

“It’s systematic,” said Amiry-Moghaddam, an Iranian-Norwegian neuroscientist who founded the group. “And we’ve never experienced this pattern before.”

The government blamed the protests and subsequent violence on foreign-backed armed “terrorists.”

Health Ministry spokesman Hossein Kermanpour denied reports that treatment had been prevented or protesters removed from hospitals, calling them “false, but also fundamentally impossible.” He was quoted in state media as saying that all the injured were treated “without any discrimination or interference on political views.” Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the doctors’ accounts.

The crackdown, which reached its peak on January 8 and 9, was the deadliest since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. The full death toll and other details took time to emerge due to internet restrictions imposed by authorities.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency says it has confirmed more than 7,000 deaths and is investigating thousands more. The government has acknowledged more than 3,000 deaths, although it has undercounted or failed to report deaths from past unrest.

Once the crackdown began, Rasht’s doctor said he lived through 66 hours of hell, traveling each day to a different facility to treat the injured – first a trauma center, then a hospital and finally a private clinic.

On January 8, “every 15 to 30 minutes, the entire emergency department was emptied and then filled with new patients,” the doctor explained.

The situation worsened on January 9, as injuries from live ammunition became more frequent and security officers became more threatening.

Officers brought in injured protesters and monitored them while staff worked, the doctor said. They burst into the wards, armed with automatic rifles, threatening staff, filming patients and checking documents.

When it came time to release a patient, he said, “they would take anyone who was confirmed to be a protester.”

At one point, security guards brought the body of a dead man with his hands chained in front of his body. He was shot in the abdomen and chest and shot in the head, he said.

He recognized the man immediately. Moments earlier, his family had shown his photo in the hospital, asking if he had been admitted.

Amnesty International has received credible reports that targeted, point-blank shootings of protesters have taken place, and “on a much larger scale” than in previous crackdowns on protests, said Raha Bahereini, an Iran researcher at the group. Two videos verified by AP show the bodies of protesters with shots fired at point-blank range and medical equipment connected to their bodies.

The doctor said he and other staff tried to hide the injured protesters by recording false diagnoses in hospital records. Gunshots to the abdomen were identified as abdominal pain; fractures were recorded as a fall accident. A patient who had been shot in the genitals was identified as a urology patient.

“We knew that no matter what we did for the patients, they would not be safe once they left the hospital,” he said.

The AP could not independently confirm the doctor’s account of events at Rasht hospital. But this is consistent with other AP reporting.

The AP verified videos posted from four hospitals as a snapshot of Iranian security force activity. Mnemonic gathered dozens of videos, posts and other accounts that he said showed forces were present in and around nine hospitals, in some cases firing guns and tear gas. Mnemonic has been preserving digital evidence of human rights violations in Iran since 2022, creating with partners an archive of more than 2 million documents.

Video verified by AP shows security guards walking through the glass entrance doors of Imam Khomeini Hospital in the western city of Ilam. They then burst into the hallways with their weapons, yelling at people.

The Health Ministry told state media it was investigating the incident, saying it was committed to protecting medical centers, staff and patients.

Other videos verified by AP show a heavy presence of security forces surrounding three hospitals in Tehran, firing tear gas and chasing protesters.

Other doctors worked in clandestine centers to treat the wounded far from the authorities.

On the night of January 8, a 37-year-old general surgeon was having dinner in Tehran when he received a call from a professional friend he had not heard from in years. The friend, an ophthalmologist, spoke in vague terms, but the fear in her voice made it clear that she urgently needed his help. She gave him an address.

Just before midnight, he went to the address of a cosmetic procedure clinic. Inside, he found the hall transformed into a trauma room, with more than 30 injured men, women, children and elderly people on the sofas and the blood-covered floor, screaming and crying:

The surgeon spent nearly four days there, treating more than 90 people, he estimates, while volunteers brought in more injured people. At first, it was just him, the ophthalmologist, a dentist and two nurses.

He used cardboard boxes and pieces of soft metal as splints for broken bones. Without anesthesia or strong painkillers, he used weaker suppository painkillers. The clinic had no blood reserves or transfusion capacity, so he gave them intravenous drips to rehydrate them and raise their blood pressure, a process that took hours.

At some point that night, the phone lines went down and for 12 hours he was unable to call for help. They couldn’t send patients to the hospital for fear they would be arrested.

A woman, in her thirties, was hit by a bird bullet at close range, destroying the roof of her mouth and the area around her nose and under her eyes, the surgeon recalls.

A young man in his twenties received a live bullet in the elbow, shattering it. The surgeon sutured the wounds but knew the arm would have to be amputated.

A family of four – a mother, father and their children aged 8 and 10 – were all riddled with pellets, the surgeon said. The older boy had dozens of bullets in his face, but surprisingly, none hit his eyes.

On the morning of January 9, the phone lines started working again and the surgeon contacted doctors he trusted to refer patients to them. He first had to make sure to remove all the bullets and pellets from their bodies so they wouldn’t be detained in the hospital. He wrote referral letters saying patients had been in car accidents.

The surgeon summoned three other doctors to help him in the hidden clinic. When new wounded arrived, the stabilized patients would applaud them and give them a victory sign, he explained.

“They started to make the atmosphere joyful with their pain. … I just couldn’t believe that moment,” the surgeon said, his voice breaking. “It was so human.”

None of the injured died at the clinic, although two bodies with gunshot wounds to the head were brought in, he said. The AP could not independently confirm the surgeon’s account of events at the clinic.

Since January 9, at least 79 medical professionals have been arrested, including a dozen medical students, according to Homa Fathi, an Iranian dentist pursuing a doctorate. in Canada and a member of IIPHA which has been monitoring Iranian government action against medical professionals since 2022. Many of those detained have been accused of resisting security officers’ orders or other charges related to providing medical care to protesters, Fathi said.

About 30 have been released, most on bail, but many still face charges, including one accused of “war against God,” a charge punishable by the death penalty, Fathi said. Authorities are also keeping some doctors under home surveillance to ensure they do not see or visit injured protesters — an unprecedented level of control, she said.

The surgeon who treated protesters at the secret clinic said he was surprised that security forces never stormed the location to make arrests.

But since then, arrests have followed one another. Two health workers who volunteered at the clinic were arrested at their homes, the surgeon said.

“I’m waiting too.”