An eye witness to the massacre of protestors in the southern Iranian city of Mahshahr during the recent Iran protests has told Iran International that the Revolutionary Guards had deployed “one brigade of special forces accompanied by two tanks and six armoured personnel carriers armed with mounted heavy machine guns, and even used military helicopters in their assault on the people of the city’’.

The deadly attacks on protestors took place mainly in the townships of Chamran, Rajaie and Taleghani, according to the eyewitness account.

‘’Upon their arrival in Mahshahr, the Revolutionary Guard forces first went to Chamran and began shooting at the people with DShK machine guns on the ground, and from helicopters”, the eyewitness told Iran International.

“The Guards even shot and killed people in their own homes, those who had not taken part in the protests”.

The eyewitness, who remains anonymous, added: “during the first hour of the assault on protestors, 17 people, including two children aged four and eight, and a woman in her seventies, were killed by direct gunfire from the Revolutionary Guards.

However the exact number of victims killed in the assault is not known as many young protestors fled into the marshlands and were killed by Guards spraying bullets in their direction.

According to various reports, nearly 100 protestors were killed while seeking cover among the reeds of the marshlands.

The eyewitness emphasised that the actual number of people killed in Mahshahr by the regime’s Revolutionary Guard forces is not yet known because the Guards collected all the corpses and took them away in a truck. There were even some seriously injured survivors of the attack, but they were refused hospital treatment by order of the Revolutionary Guard.

The eyewitness concluded, "that afternoon, the Revolutionary Guards arrived and left no one alive... The Revolutionary Guards deliberately started a bloodbath… which didn’t end until the village elders interceded and Taleghani lays under siege”