This page keeps the memory of 23 people who were killed in Robat Karim, in the province of Tehran. Only one fate is recorded in the list for Robat Karim: all of these 23 people were killed in protests. No execution and no death in custody appears on this page; this city gave its dead in the street. And most of them in a single year: 20 of these 23 people belong to the year 1398.
Aban 1398 and after
For the 20 names that go back to the year 1398, our sources have not recorded the exact day of death; only the year is known. Three other names have a clear date: one person was killed on 1 Mehr 1401, one person on 18 Dey 1404 and one person on 19 Dey 1404. That is, in this list Robat Karim is a city that once, in 1398, saw great grief, and after that, in every uprising, another name was added to this page.
Those whose age we know were between 17 and 30 years old, and the median age is 23 years. None of them reached the age of thirty-one. This page is a page of young people. One of these 23 people was under 18; a child you will read about below. No woman is recorded on this list whose being a woman a source has stated explicitly.
Abolfazl Jahedi
Abolfazl Jahedi was 17 years old, from Songhor, and lived in Robat Karim. The source writes: “He had been working since about the age of 15.” For a while he was a mechanic's apprentice, and “at night he handed out flyers and worked as a waiter in reception halls.” On days when he had no money for the fare, he walked to school. With his savings he had bought a second-hand motorcycle, but according to the source “he only had the chance to use it for two months.”
He dreamed of becoming a firefighter. The source says: “On the morning of 20 Dey he was supposed to go to the firefighting college to complete his registration.” He was worried about the cost of the firefighter's uniform, but had told his family he would work more and earn the money himself. On the evening of 19 Dey, one night before that day, he was killed by a direct shot to the head.
One of the witnesses has described the moment of his death as follows: “Because of his heavy shoes he could not run away quickly, and since he was tall, part of his head could be seen from behind the bin. The sniper targeted him and the bullet struck his head.” That same night the hospital did not hand the body over to the family and sent them to Kahrizak, and according to the source, “Abolfazl's father was forced to search among a large number of bodies of those killed.”
Twenty-two other names
For the rest of this page, the sources have said nothing but a name and a year and sometimes an age. The twenty people who were killed in Robat Karim in 1398 are still faceless on this list. We do not know which of them was a worker, which of them a student, who had just become a father. Each of them, like Abolfazl, had a life worth telling.
Sources and the incompleteness of the list
These 23 names are not all of those killed in Robat Karim. Those killed in this city are more than these, and the names of many of them never made their way into any report; we add no name from Robat Karim to this page without a source. Most of the names on this page, 21 cases, come from Persian Wikipedia. The other sources are iranhrs.org, independentpersian.com and Iran Kargar with 2 cases each, and the Iran Human Rights Society, HRANA, Iran International, iranintl.com and Iran International with one case each. One name also appears in a list that the Office of the Presidency published on 12 Bahman 1404. Because most of the names from Robat Karim rest on only one source, there may be errors in the spelling of a name or in an age.
If you knew one of these 23 people, especially if you have news of those killed in this city in 1398, we ask you to send us your memory or correction.