🔶 Four years of seeking justice; Zahedan’s open wound and standing against forgetting

🔻 A report by Omid Baryn

The eighth of Mehr 1401 is beyond a date or a news headline; it is an open wound on the collective psyche of Iran and one of the darkest days of the nationwide uprising. An autumn afternoon in which the peace of worship at the Zahedan Prayer Site was shattered, when military gunfire was fired at protestors and worshippers, who were then laid in blood and earth.

In the tragedy of the “Bloody Friday of Zahedan,” according to documentation by Amnesty International and local human-rights institutions such as “Haalvosh,” at least 104 Baloch citizens—among them at least 16 children—lost their lives, and more than 300 people were left in the midst of the government’s indifference with injured bodies and permanent disabilities. This crime was not only an irreversible turning point in the pursuit of justice in Balochistan, but also shook the humanitarian conscience of the world.

Now four years have passed since that bitter afternoon—years that have been marked, for grieving families, by the weight of the absence of their loved ones, and, for the injured, by being forced to endure under the shadow of continuous security threats.

DW Farsi has gone to those who lived through that day with their own skin in order to gain a deeper understanding of this human suffering and to examine the challenges along the path to justice. In this report, through interviews with an eyewitness, a member of the victims’ families, human-rights activists, and journalists, you will read an account of a tragedy in which the blood that was shed crossed ethnic boundaries and became an unbreakable thread of nationwide solidarity.