Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bodies lay on the ground inside a warehouse. Some are wrapped in body bags, others on stretchers. Men and women move among the corpses, scrutinizing faces as they search for missing loved ones. A woman weeps, bent over a lifeless body. Shared on social media on Saturday, January 10, the short, close-up video filmed at the morgue of the Kahrizak forensic center south of Tehran suggests the crackdown unfolding in the Iranian capital’s streets has turned into a bloodbath.

On Sunday, another video, this time running six minutes, surfaced on social media, showing the outside of the morgue, with bodies wrapped in bags and lined up on the tarmac for several hundred meters. A monitor at the forensic center displays the faces of dead protesters brought to the site. The face of a young man appears on the screen, accompanied by the caption “number 55 out of 250,” offering a chilling indication of the scale of the repression. Sobs and screams come from different directions. “Murderers!” shouts a woman dressed in a black chador. “May they be cursed,” a man sobs.

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