Point-blank shootings at protests, hangars filled with corpses and omnipresent security forces: Multiple accounts gathered by Le Monde attest to the unparalleled violence used by authorities to suppress the demonstrations.

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Kiarash had only managed a few hours of sleep since Saturday, January 10. The dull thud of three bodies collapsing around him during a protest in Tehran still echoed in his mind. “I was at Kadj Square [northwest]. We were chanting: ‘Death to [Ali] Khamenei.’ I saw a woman in a chador walk by. Then I heard: ‘Click. Click.’ A man fell to the ground next to me. The woman in the chador moved forward. I saw her pistol with a silencer. Click. Click. One bullet to the head. One bullet to the legs. A second body fell, then a third. I shouted: ‘Catch her! She’s shooting at people!’ I don’t know if it was really a woman or a man disguised under the chador. She ran off, and I lost sight of her in the crowd.”

Kiarash (who preferred not to reveal his last name) was in Iran during the recent wave of protests. He returned home to Europe on Sunday, January 11, and testified to the unprecedented scale of the crackdown orchestrated by the Islamic Republic, while access to the internet had been cut since January 8. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, an organization based in the United States, at least 2,571 people have been killed during this wave of protests, including around 100 law enforcement officers. This death toll far exceeds that of previous waves of protest in Iran over recent decades. It is also almost certainly a significant underestimate, given how fragmented information from inside the country remains.

Kiarash himself saw many lifeless bodies in Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran’s large cemetery located in the south of the city. A few hours before joining the protest on January 10, he had gone there to help identify the body of his sister-in-law’s best friend, who had been shot dead the previous day. “Write down her name: Nassim Pouraghayi, 41 years old, mother of a daughter and a son,” Kiarash wrote on WhatsApp. On Friday, January 9, Nassim and her husband stepped out onto the street in the Pounak district in western Tehran. They were walking side by side when, suddenly, Nassim knelt down. “I thought she had fainted, but when I looked at her, she was covered in blood,” her husband told Kiarash.