Amirhossein Saedi’s father had urged him to stay home. The protests sweeping Iran were growing more dangerous by the day, and the 19-year-old computer science student was still recovering from illness.
But Saedi was determined. “Adrenaline has risen in my blood,” he told his family. “I’m flying. Tonight, I want to fly.”
By the next evening, Saedi was dying in his father’s arms – shot in the face on the street in Tehran during a brutal crackdown on demonstrations by Iranian security forces, according to a relative inside Iran who spoke to CNN anonymously for fear of reprisals.
Thousands were killed in a matter of days in early January. But for Saedi’s family, like so many others, the ordeal did not end with his death. Authorities, they say, sought to bury the truth about how he and other protesters were killed.
With the help of human rights groups and activists, CNN has gathered testimony from more than a dozen families, who say they were pressured to falsify the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths.
Threatening relatives of protesters has long been a tactic used by Iranian authorities to suppress dissent. But following the January crackdown, rights groups say the practice became systematic, as the regime sought to reinforce its narrative that security forces were defending the country from US- and Israel-backed agents.
In many cases, families say they were pressured to register their loved ones as members of the Basij paramilitary volunteer militia, the state-backed force charged with suppressing the protests. Others were instructed to describe them as “martyrs” for the Islamic Republic killed by terrorist groups or foreign agents. Some say they were told to say their relatives died from drug overdoses or accidents.
After Saedi’s death, security forces attended the family’s mourning ceremonies and later went to his parents’ home, the relative said, threatening to kill their other child if they did not cooperate.
“They told Amirhossein’s father he was talking too much, because he had been saying his son was shot in front of his eyes,” the relative said.
“We have to announce your child as a martyr and you cannot speak anywhere,” the family was told, according to the relative. “You must not say anything – unless you want your other child’s fate to be the same as this one.”
Boy, 13, shot in the neck
Firsthand testimony of these intimidation tactics is hard to obtain from inside Iran, where many are too afraid to speak out against the regime. CNN has reviewed text and audio messages sent by multiple family members that point to a widespread use of coercion.
In one case, the father of a 13-year-old was told to declare his son a member of the Basij forces or pay around six billion rials – roughly $4000-$5,000 depending on the volatile exchange rate – according to messages sent to activist group IranWire and seen by CNN. The minimum wage in Iran is is only around $110 per month.
The boy, Abolfazl Vahid Gezeljeh-Meydan, had lost his mother to Covid-19 at nine and later left school to work as a trainee shoemaker, hoping one day to earn enough to buy foreign-made sneakers. On January 8, when thousands took to the streets in Tehran to protest deteriorating living conditions, Abolfazl was among them. He was shot in the neck, according to his relative and as seen in images of his body reviewed by CNN.
A relative said the family continues to receive calls insisting “Zionists” killed him and urging them to allow officials to visit their home carrying the flag of Imam Hussein, a revered 7th century figure in Shia Islam and potent symbol of martyrdom in the regime’s ideology.
Abolfazl’s family say they have so far resisted the intimidation tactics and were able to negotiate a reduction in the amount demanded due to their connections. But for many other families enduring Iran’s grinding cost of living crisis, they had no choice but to accept.
The family of Fahimeh Ajam, 29, who was killed while protesting in Azadshahr in the northeastern Golestan province, also described threats from officials, religious leaders and security forces pressing them to blame her death on terrorists rather than state forces.
“Two cars with armed men were outside our yard,” a relative said in a text message shared with CNN by IranWire. “They came to our house and said that the terrorists killed Fahimeh and that she must be declared a ‘martyr.’”
An official later called her brother and “warned him to be careful what he says and not create problems for yourselves or even the grave could be disturbed.”
Some family members outside Iran have been able to speak more freely about what their loved ones have endured since the crackdown began.
Parviz Afshari’s 17-year-old son Sam was hit by a bullet in his lower back on the streets of Karaj on January 8. His father who is now based in Germany, told CNN Sam was taken to hospital but killed there by state security forces with what he described as a “finishing shot” while still attached to an oxygen mask and IV.
Afshari said when his wife went to collect Sam’s body he was so badly injured in the face he had to be identified by a tattoo on his chest. Security forces demanded his wife sign a paper saying Sam was a Basij member killed by terrorists.
“That is when my wife, her sister, and my brother protested, to the point that they fired a warning shot into the air to calm things down,” Afshari said.
His wife continued to refuse and eventually they allowed them to bury Sam but because cemeteries were so overloaded he had to be buried in a remote location with another young protester in the same grave.
Since Sam was buried, plainclothes officers have gone to the family home multiple times to threaten them his father said.
The full scale of the crackdown on Iran’s protests in late December and early January remains contested.
President Donald Trump recently claimed 32,000 people were killed during the protests — a far higher figure than previously reported. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) says at least 6,488 protesters were killed and that it is working to verify thousands more cases.
The Iranian government acknowledges more than 3,000 deaths and has published a list of names, but blames most of the killings on “rioters” who were part of what it describes as an organized Israeli-led plot.
CNN reached out to the Iranian government to ask about protester relatives’ allegations officials and security forces tried to coerce them into making false statements about the circumstances of their deaths.
‘Systematic’ efforts
While the exact number of families pressured to falsify death records is unknown, Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam of the Norway-based group Iran Human Rights estimates the tactic was of more cases involving male protesters that his organization has been able to document.
“What stands out this time is how systematic and openly brutal the pressure has become,” Amiry-Moghaddam said. “It goes beyond forcing families into silence. The pattern suggests an intent to humiliate, using intimidation and degrading treatment to demonstrate power, break resistance, and send a broader message of fear to society.”
Mousa Barzin, a human rights lawyer based outside Iran who advocates for protesters and their families, told CNN he has handled multiple cases in which authorities attempted to construct a false narrative, primarily by pressuring families to label victims as Basij members.
“In some cities we received reports that if families refused, the authorities buried the bodies themselves in undisclosed locations,” he said. “Days later, they would inform the families that the burial had taken place.”
“When an issue is this widespread in terms of numbers and geography, we can describe it as systematic,” Barzin added.
The campaign to manipulate the deaths of protesters is, according to Barzin a tool for the Iranian state’s propaganda. “It wants to say that there were armed individuals claiming to be protesters who killed our forces, and that we ourselves are the victims,” he said.
Many families say they have been pressured to appear on state media, eulogizing their relatives in heavily edited interviews set to mournful music, sometimes even accompanied by AI-generated reenactments of their final moments.
Saedi’s relative says it is all a performance for the cameras by a regime that shows no mercy.
“Its own people came out into the streets empty-handed to protest – over rising prices or whatever their grievance was – and they massacred them.”