When the doctor and others tried to resuscitate the man, a group of armed, plainclothes security agents blocked their way, pushing some back with their rifles, the doctor told The Associated Press.
“They surrounded him and didn’t allow us to move further,” the doctor in the northern city of Rasht said.
Minutes later, the man was dead. The agents put his body in a black body bag. Later, they piled it and other bodies into the back of a van and drove away.
This wasn't an isolated incident.
Over the course of a few days in early January, plainclothes agents swarmed hospitals in multiple cities treating the thousands wounded by Iranian security forces who fired on crowds to quash massive protests against the 47-year-old Islamic Republic. These agents monitored and sometimes obstructed care to protesters, intimidated staff, seized protesters and took away the dead in body bags. Dozens of doctors were 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 of the doctors inside Iran spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The doctors in Iran and abroad said the level of brutality and militarization of health facilities was unprecedented in a country that for decades has experienced crackdowns on dissent and surveillance of public institutions. In at least one instance, snipers on the roof of a hospital in the northern town of Gorgan shot at approaching patients, according to a witness’ account provided by IIPHA, a U.S.-based association of Iranian health care professionals.
The Iran Human Rights Center, based in Oslo, has documented multiple accounts from inside hospitals of security agents preventing medical care, removing patients from ventilators, harassing doctors and detaining protesters.
