PARIS: US President Donald Trump urged Iranians on Tuesday to keep protesting against the country’s theocratic leadership, telling them “help is on its way” as international outrage grows over a crackdown one rights group said has likely killed thousands.
Iranian authorities insisted they had regained control after successive nights of mass protests nationwide since Thursday that have posed one of the biggest challenges to the clerical leadership since the 1979 Islamic revolution that ousted the shah.
Rights groups accuse the government of fatally shooting protesters and masking the scale of the crackdown with an Internet blackout that has now lasted almost five days.
New videos on social media, whose location AFP verified, showed bodies lined up in the Kahrizak morgue just south of the Iranian capital, with the corpses wrapped in black bags and distraught relatives searching for loved ones.
International phone links were restored on Tuesday, but only for outgoing calls, according to an AFP journalist, and the quality remains spotty, with frequent interruptions.
