- Two videos posted online show a protest in a town in western Iran, checks by BBC Verify confirm
- We’re reviewing video from Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine, which appears to show drones being flown into individual cars and exploding
- Plus we’re looking into the UK government’s decision not to cancel some English local elections due to be held in May
- BBC Verify uses open-source intelligence, satellite imagery, fact-checking and data analysis to help report complex stories
Reports indicate events have been planned to commemorate 40 days since the Iranian government began a deadly crackdown on protests which swept the country earlier this year. Activists have said at least 6,000 people were killed.
The clips from Abdanan, in Ilam province near the border with Iraq, show about 100 protesters stood at a major roundabout, raising their fists and chanting “death to Khamenei” – Iran’s supreme leader. Cars are at a near standstill, with horns blaring.
We verified the location as being to the junction of East Valli Asr and Shahid Motahari streets by matching features in the videos like shopfronts to publicly available images.
The protest is likely to have been recorded last night, as one video is watermarked by yesterday’s date in the Solar Hijri calendar used in Iran. Reverse-searching screenshots from the videos indicate they have not been shared publicly online before last night and the dry conditions also match local weather reports.
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