Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday said “several thousand people” died in this month’s anti-govt demonstrations, his first acknowledgment of the deadly scale of the unrest. Some of those were killed “brutally and inhumanely,” Khamenei said without offering detail in a public meeting broadcast on state TV. He accused the US and Israel of aiding the killings and said the Islamic Republic has evidence to support the claim. Iran doesn’t intend to push the country toward war, but won’t allow either domestic or international criminals to go unpunished, he said. He said US President Trump was culpable for “deaths, damage, and accusations he has inflicted on the Iranian people,” and that Washington’s broader policy goal was to place Iran under military, political, and economic domination. (This is a Bloomberg story)
