by Andrew Jehring and Natalie Lisbona, Daily Mail
For over eight hours the crimes the Iranian regime tried to hide from the world play out unfiltered.
Snipers aim for the heads of street protesters and pull the trigger. Machinegun fire rips through the crowds.
Teenagers cower in homes from the armed paramilitaries marauding outside, as wounded friends bleed out in their arms.
Mutilated bodies are left where they fall. Later, in a final humiliation, the dead overwhelm mortuaries – packed side-by-side like slabs of meat, waiting for collection.
But amid all the gore and the piercing howls of grief, it is the quiet words of a father searching for his son that stay with you from This Is Our Story, a powerful new documentary by Iranian opposition channel Manoto which premieres on YouTube on Saturday.
‘Sepehr, my boy, where are you?’ Esmail Shokri tenderly calls out. ‘Sepehr, my son, where are you?’ he repeats, again and again, his voice breaking from tears.
He goes from body to body at Kahrizak Forensics Centre near Tehran looking for his 26-year-old who was among tens of thousands estimated to have been killed last January.
For 12 minutes, he examines hundreds of corpses of mainly young men and women killed on the orders of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
‘Oh those poor young men, just look at them, look where they have ended…’ he says.