Protestors at a vigil in Cologne, Germany, for Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian woman who died in police custody. Photo: Reuters/Ying Tang

As protests against the ruling mullahs continued to rock Iran this Friday, the regime again attacked its international adversaries, accusing US, Israeli and other foreign intelligence services of deliberately stoking nationwide demonstrations under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.”

In a joint statement, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the Ministry of Intelligence charged that there were “numerous examples and undeniable references of the all-out role of the American terrorist regime in designing, implementing, and maintaining” the unrest in the country.

The statement accused the US of having fabricated the claim that Mahsa Amini — a 22-year-old Kurdish student murdered last month by the regime’s “Morality Police” for allegedly not wearing her hijab, or headscarf, in the appropriate manner —  died in custody before the results of the official investigation into her case were announced.

“Intelligence evidence shows that the CIA had devised an extensive plan with the cooperation of allied spy services and reactionary proxies before the start of the unrest to initiate a nationwide chaos with the aim of committing crimes against the great Iranian nation and the country’s territorial integrity as well as paving the ground for increasing foreign pressures,” the statement said. It went onto accuse the intelligence services of the UK, Saudi Arabia and Israel — referred to as the “Zionist regime” — of supporting the supposed American destabilization efforts in Iran.

Video posted by Iranian human rights activists on social media platforms on Friday showed large crowds of demonstrators in several cities, many of whom chanted calls for the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s “Supreme Leader.”

Reports of dozens of people killed or wounded by security forces included the case of a 16-year-old girl, Sarina Saedi, in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj. According the Hengaw human rights organization, Saedi was severely beaten by security agents on Thursday. She was taken to the Tawheed Hospital in Sanandaj where she died from a brain hemorrhage.

An unnamed relative of the Saedi family told Hengaw that the authorities had instructed her parents to describe Sarina’s death as a suicide. They also claimed that attendance at her funeral was restricted to ten people, citing “security concerns” on the part of the authorities.