Trump warns of 'very strong action' if Iran hangs protesters

PARIS (France) Jan 14 (AFP): US President Donald Trump warned of unspecified "very strong action" if Iranian authorities go ahead with threatened hangings of some protesters, with Tehran calling American warnings a "pretext for military intervention".

International outrage has built over the crackdown that a rights group said has likely killed thousands during protests posing one of the biggest challenges yet to Iran's clerical leadership.

Iran's UN mission posted a statement on X, vowing that Washington's "playbook" would "fail again".

"US fantasies and policy toward Iran are rooted in regime change, with sanctions, threats, engineered unrest, and chaos serving as the modus operandi to manufacture a pretext for military intervention," the post said. Iranian authorities have insisted they had regained control of the country after successive nights of mass protests nationwide since.

Rights groups accuse the government of fatally shooting protesters and masking the scale of the crackdown with an internet blackout that has now surpassed the five-day mark.

New videos on social media, with locations verified by AFP, showed bodies lined up in the Kahrizak morgue just south of the Iranian capital, with the corpses wrapped in black bags and distraught relatives searching for loved ones.