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Iran authorities ramp up crackdown, blame CIA and Mossad for nation-wide unrest

Demonstrators are being charged with crimes punishable by death, including “inciting people to commit crimes against the country’s security” and “corruption on Earth.”

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Iranian authorities ramped down their crackdown on protesters over the weekend, with thousands believed to have been arrested and two female journalists criminally charged for allegedly acting as foreign agents.

After Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, 22, died after being obtained by morality police in Tehran for allegedly wearing her mandatory headscarf improperly, protests demanding an end to the Islamic regime and imposition of the Islamic dress code on Iran’s women have sprung up across the country.

According to a Washington Post report, the two journalists who made Amini’s story public, Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, have officially been charged with the crime of being “primary sources of news for foreign media.”

If found guilty, Hamedi and Mohammadi could be sentenced to death.

Protests began in mid-September, and human rights groups say that since then, tens of thousands of demonstrators have been detained and at least 250 have been killed by live fire from IRGC troops.

According to local Farsi-language outlet Mizan, the criminal trials of five detained protesters began over the weekend.

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The demonstrators are being charged with crimes punishable by death, including “inciting people to commit crimes against the country’s security” and “corruption on Earth.”

In a public statement issued late Friday, Iranian authorities alleged that the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agencies were behind the demonstrations.

The spy agencies “planned extensively to launch a nationwide riot in Iran with the aim of committing crimes against the great nation of Iran and its territorial integrity, as well as laying the groundwork for the intensification of external pressures,” the statement read.

A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander warned students that street demonstrations would be quashed with force on Saturday, after tens of thousands have protested in cities across Iran over the death of a young woman while in custody of the Islamic country’s morality police.

“Do not come to the streets! Today is the last day of the riots,” IRGC commander Hossein Salami said in a public statement on Saturday, while attributing the widespread demonstrations on Western powers. “This sinister plan, is a plan hatched … in the White House and the Zionist regime.”