OUTRAGE: Families Of Dead Forced To Pay ‘Bullet Fee’

iran_bloody_shirt.jpg

WALL STREET JOURNAL: When Mr. Alipour didn’t return home that night, his parents began to worry. All day, they had heard gunshots ringing in the distance. His father, Yousef, first called his fiancée and friends. No one had heard from him. At the crack of dawn, his father began searching at police stations, then hospitals and then the morgue. Upon learning of his son’s death, the elder Mr. Alipour was told the family had to pay an equivalent of $3,000 as a “bullet fee”—a fee for the bullet used by security forces—before taking the body back, relatives said. Mr. Alipour told officials that his entire possessions wouldn’t amount to $3,000, arguing they should waive the fee because he is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war. According to relatives, morgue officials finally agreed, but demanded that the family do no funeral or burial in Tehran. MORE

WIKIPEDIA: In the People’s Republic of China, shooting as a method of execution takes two typical formats, either an assault rifle shot in the back of the head or in the neck or a shot by an automatic rifle in the back from behind. It is also noted that in the past the government collected a “bullet fee”[1] from the relatives of the condemned. MORE

neda_agha_soltan.jpgBBC: The officials from the morgue asked if they could use parts of [Neda‘s] corpse for body transplants for medical patients. They didn’t specify what exactly they intended to do. Her family agreed because they wanted to bury her as soon as possible. We buried her in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran. They asked us to bury her in this section where it seemed the authorities had set aside spaces for graves for those killed during the violent clashes in Tehran last week. On Monday afternoon, we had planned to hold a memorial service at the mosque. But the authorities there and the paramilitary group, the Basij, wouldn’t allow it because they were worried it would attract unwanted attention and they didn’t want anymore trouble. MORE

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *