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Update | 1:15 p.m. A reader wrote to tell us earlier that CNN had conducted a phone interview with a woman who said she had witnessed today’s events in Tehran. This telephone interview does not appear to be posted on CNN’s Web site yet, but another reader points out that some of the audio of the woman’s account has been posted on YouTube.
Using this video and a rough transcription of some of the interview made by The Guardian, we have been able to piece together what the woman told Ivan Watson of CNN:
I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone.
They tried to beat everyone on Saadi bridge and throwing them off of the bridge…. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, who was watching the scene, he just fainted. I also saw people shooting, I mean the security forces shooting on people, on Lalezar. Of course were afraid....
They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. They were cursing — saying very bad words to everyone. They were beating old men. And this was exactly a massacre. You should stop this. You should stop this. You should help the people of Iran who demand freedom. You should help us.
Update | 1:11 p.m. Lara Setrakian of ABC News in Dubai writes on Twitter that she has heard from sources in Tehran:
they are beating people severely. helicopters all over the city finding protesters & telling guards so they go attack
people are hoarding the injured in their homes because they’re afraid of going to hospitals