An Iranian amateur boxer was shot dead by Iranian security forces amid ongoing anti-regime protests near Tehran, with his father spending a week searching before locating his body in a black body bag.
Distressing footage circulating online depicts his grief-stricken father frantically searching through stacks of bodies wrapped in black body bags, calling out for his missing son.
According to Iranian opposition sources, 19-year-old Sepehr Ebrahimi was killed on January 11 in the Andisheh area, roughly 19 miles west of Tehran’s city center.
“Sepehr was shot and killed in Tehran,” Ali Safavi, a senior official with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told Digital.
Social media-shared video, which Digital viewed, shows Ebrahimi’s father shouting his son’s name while searching a warehouse filled with unidentified bodies after a .
“My dear Sepehr, where are you?” the father is heard sobbing. At one point, he yells, “Damn Khamenei. They’ve killed so many people’s children. You’ve killed so many young people!”
According to Safavi, Ebrahimi was by Iran’s security forces during protests against the clerical regime.
His family endured a week of anguish, scouring morgues, hospitals, and detention centers, before ultimately identifying his body among stacks of corpses, as seen in the widely shared footage.
The killing occurs against the backdrop of ongoing protests across Iran, where anger persists over political repression, economic struggles, and human rights violations.
Ebrahimi’s death has also refocused attention on the case of another , Mohammad Javad Vafaei Sani, who is on death row.
Vafaei Sani, now 30, is a champion boxer arrested in 2020 for taking part in nationwide pro-democracy protests.
Iranian authorities have accused him of supporting the opposition group the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK).
He has spent five years in prison, during which he has reportedly been tortured and held in prolonged solitary confinement, according to
In 2023, over 100 human rights experts and international organizations sent a letter to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, calling for urgent action to halt Vafaei Sani’s execution.
His death sentence mirrors that of Iranian wrestling champion Navid Afkari, who was executed in September 2020.
Meanwhile, the death of Ebrahimi and others come as Iran’s continues to rise.
According to (HRANA), at least 6,126 people have been killed since the latest wave of protests began.
HRANA also noted that 214 government-affiliated forces and 49 civilians have been killed, with over 17,000 deaths still under investigation.