🔻Massoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, in an interview whose first part was aired on Iranian television on Wednesday (14 Mordad), spoke about the protests of the previous December and the people killed and injured in those protests, saying: “I still can’t forget these events, and our work shouldn’t have reached this point.”

Mr. Pezeshkian, at the same time, accused the U.S. government of arming the protesters and, referring to the number of deaths in December, said: “Those who are sitting abroad and announce the number of deaths in December as 30 or 40 thousand are dishonest and traitors to the country.”

The protests of December 1404, which initially began in response to the ongoing rise in the exchange rate and economic hardships in the Tehran market, quickly took on an anti-government character and spread to different cities.

From the beginning of the December protests, security forces began suppressing the protesters and some people were killed, but the most violent days of the crackdown on these protests occurred on December 18 and 19, and as a result, thousands of protesting citizens across Iran were killed by security forces.

As for the exact number of those killed in the December protests, different figures have been reported by various sources up to now.