Hundreds of photos revealing the faces of those killed during the violent crackdown on anti-government protests in Iran have been published on BBC Verify.
The photographs, which are too graphic to display without blurring, reveal the bloodied, swollen and bruised faces of at least 326 victims – including 18 women. The images, displayed in a morgue south of Tehran, are one of the only ways families have been able to identify their dead loved ones.
Many of the victims were too disfigured to be identified, and 69 people were labeled in Persian as John or Jane Doe, suggesting their identities were unknown when the photo was taken. Only 28 of the victims had name tags visible in the photo.
The tags of more than 100 victims whose date of death was recorded showed that date as January 9, one of the deadliest nights for protesters in Tehran so far.
The city's streets were set ablaze during clashes with security forces, with protesters chanting slogans against the supreme leader and the Islamic Republic. This followed a call for nationwide protests by Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late Shah.
The released photos offer a glimpse into the thousands of people believed to have been killed at the hands of the Iranian state.
BBC Verify has been following the spread of protests across Iran since they broke out in late December, but the near-total internet shutdown imposed by the authorities has made it extremely difficult to document the scale of the government's violence against those who oppose it.
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has publicly acknowledged that several thousand people have been killed, but blamed the US, Israel and those he described as "rebels".
Despite the power outage entering its third week, a small number of people have managed to extract some information.
Hundreds of close-up images of victims taken from inside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center were published on BBC Verify.
392 photos of the victims were analyzed and 326 people were identified – some had multiple photos taken from different angles. Sources claimed that the true number of dead in the morgue was in the thousands.
One source said they were not prepared for the level of destruction they encountered inside the morgue complex and said they saw victims ranging in age from 12 or 13 to 60 and 70. “It was just too much,” they said.
Amid the chaos inside the morgue, family members and friends huddled together around a screen. They were trying to identify their loved ones as hundreds of images of the dead scrolled across the screen.
The slide show lasted for hours, they said, adding that many of the victims' injuries were so severe they could not be identified. One man's face was so swollen that his eyes were barely visible. Another man still had a breathing tube in his mouth, suggesting he died after receiving medical treatment.
We were told that some victims were so badly injured that their families asked to see the photos again and zoom in on their faces to make sure it was really them. In other cases, people recognized their loved ones immediately and were seen collapsing on the floor, screaming.
Many photos showed open body bags with papers placed next to their faces, identifying them by name, ID number or date of death. In some cases, we were told, the only identifier was a bank card placed on top of a body bag – the victims’ last remaining possessions.
