Months after the regime crackdown, Iranians search for missing protesters
His family and friends are searching everywhere for him. The official list of detainees does not feature his name. He’s not recorded among the victims identified by the Iranian Legal Medicine Organisation, the forensic department under the country’s justice ministry. Morteza Ebrahimi, 35, has been missing since January 8, a black day for many families across Iran, when the crackdown on anti-regime protests reached a brutal, bloody peak. That night, as internet access was cut across the country, the authorities unleashed hell on the streets of some Tehran neighbourhoods. Special units opened fire with military-grade weapons on protesters in the heart of the Iranian capital. Several thousand people were killed. In the days that followed, families set out to search for their missing loved ones. Many converged on the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre, a morgue in Tehran’s southern suburbs where dozens of bodies were brought in by refrigerated lorries. But there was no news, no confirmation, no closure for Ebrahimi’s loved ones. The young man had simply disappeared in the black hole of Iranian people …
