On Thursday, December 12, Montazari attended the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad to deliver a speech about “Liberalism!” “It should be considered that the university should be 100 percent empty from security issues regarding university’s climate, professors, students, and open-mindedness,” he stated. Subsequently, Montazeri who is in charge of arresting and sentencing protesters to severe punishments, claimed, “Everywhere you saw an organ has made restrictions for you, I as the Attorney-General will indict it.”

Montazeri also admitted on arbitrary arrests for quelling the recent protests, saying, “Arresting a person is not a reason for recognizing him as guilty. God knows that we don’t want to hold even one innocent person for a moment in detain, but these incidents occasionally take place in such as events and we can do nothing.”

The fact is Iranian authorities severely frighten from disclosing the scope of protests’ extension. The effort to hide the scale of their crimes against innocent people in fear of society’s wrath. In this regard, officials and official organs avoid releasing the real number of casualties. On December 7, when the Attorney-General Montazari was asked about the death toll by an ILNA reporter, he refrained from responding and answered, “Have the people assigned you [to investigate]?”

Nonetheless, the Iranian regime cannot cover up its massacres, even though it cut off the people’s internet for days. Thanks to technological progress, today each Iranian is a witness, a reporter, and a journalist who easily documents the crimes with his or her cell phone.

On the other hand, authorities are unable to deter leaking news and sometimes they themselves admit to several crimes committed by security forces. “Somebody was telling me that while he was hospitalized in a hospital in Tehran there was a nurse who was standing by the window of the room to film the street outside and she was hit by a bullet right in the middle of her forehead,” Friday prayer Imam of Asalom Mohammad Javad Bagheri admitted in his lecture on December 6.

In conclusion, as Iranian authorities evade giving any information about the death toll of the nationwide protests in the country, the international community is responsible to launch an impartial investigation. In this regard, the United Nations Security Council must draw Iranian officials to an international tribunal and recognize the fatal crackdown on Iranian protesters as a crime against humanity.

“Such panicky statements [by the regime’s General Persecutor Montazeri] do not deceive anyone but will intensify people’s anger while the death toll exceeds 1,000 and the names of some 450 have already been verified. As the November 2019 bloodbath in Iran is one of the most horrific mass killings of the 21st century, the UN Security Council must declare it a crime against humanity so that the regime’s leaders would face justice. The UN should take urgent action to dispatch an international fact-finding mission to Iran and visit the detained protesters.” The President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran Mrs. Maryam Rajavi stated on December 13.