TEHRAN — Top MP Mojtaba Zonnour has said 230 people were killed during the protests in November 2019.

“In these incidents, 230 people were killed, while 6 of them were official and security forces,” Zonnour said on Monday. IRNA reported.

“20 percent of those who were killed were in the scene as active forces in favor of order and security,” he said. “7 percent were killed in face-to-face clashes with security forces. 16 percent were killed as a result of attacking security and military centers.”

He continued, “31 percent were killed due to attacking public centers. 26 percent were not agitators but lost their lives in an unknown way. 22 percent had criminal records.”

It came immediately after Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani-Fazli suggested that nearly 200 to 225 people had been killed during the November protests.

In remarks on national television on Saturday night, Rahmani-Fazli said the death toll will be announced in the coming days, but explained that “some 40 or 45 people, meaning about 20 percent of the death toll, were people who were killed by non-governmental weapons.”

Protests erupted in Iran on November 15 after the government announced an increase in the price of gasoline, a subsidized commodity that is still cheaper in Iran than other countries in the world.

During the protests, public and private properties were damaged and banks, gas stations, and state buildings were put on fire.

In a report in December, Reuters claimed that about 1,500 people were killed during less than two weeks of unrest across Iran.

“The toll, provided to Reuters by three Iranian Interior Ministry officials, included at least 17 teenagers and about 400 women as well as some members of the security forces and police,” the London-based news outlet claimed.

An official at Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) denied Reuters’ claim at the time.

Alireza Zarifian Yeganeh, head of the SNSC Information and Communications Secretariat, said such claims were part of the anti-Iran disinformation campaign.

“Such news producing and leveling accusations is basically very easy,” he said, describing the act as a psychological operation against the Islamic Republic.

MH/PA