Brian Hook estimated that thousands more had been injured and that around 7,000 protesters had been imprisoned in the chaos.
The State Department’s special envoy to Iran on Thursday accused the Iranian government of killing as many as — if not more than — 1,000 demonstrators during a bloody crackdown in response to protests across the country.
Brian Hook told reporters during a press briefing in Foggy Bottom that U.S. officials “know for certain” the death toll is in the “many, many hundreds,” but said that number could “perhaps” stretch beyond 1,000 dead at the hands of a brutal crackdown by the Iranian regime. In addition, Hook estimated that thousands more had been injured and that around 7,000 protesters had been imprisoned in the chaos.
Hook cited one egregious incident in particular, citing video the department had received through a tip line, in which Iranian security forces surrounded a group of protesters, spraying them with bullets from machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and killing as many as 100 Iranians.
The protests began last month after a spike in gas prices, which are set by the government, in the midst of an economic crisis brought on by crippling U.S. sanctions that were reimposed after the U.S. pulled out of a multilateral nuclear pact in 2018. They’ve spread to at least 100 cities throughout Iran, Hook said Thursday, which prompted the severe response by the regime and led to Iran cutting off internet access throughout the country in an attempt to clamp down on the flow of information.
The figure announced by Hook on Thursday is significantly higher than other estimates put out by human rights groups, which put the death toll at around a couple hundred. Earlier this week, Iranian officials acknowledged that its security forces had killed “rioters” amid the protests, though it disputed an estimate from the human rights group Amnesty International.
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The State Department’s special envoy to Iran accused the Iranian government of killing as many as — if not more than — 1,000 demonstrators during a bloody crackdown in response to protests across the country https://t.co/46NO9SltDq
— POLITICO (@politico) December 5, 2019
The State Department's special envoy to Iran said U.S. officials "know for certain" the death toll is in the “many, many hundreds,” but said that number could “perhaps” stretch beyond 1,000 dead at the hands of a brutal crackdown by the Iranian regime https://t.co/C8CRYVWxrd pic.twitter.com/NAR0r7ZEWm
— POLITICO (@politico) December 5, 2019
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