The niece of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has compared her uncle to Adolf Hitler and pleaded with foreign governments to cut all ties with the regime.
Farideh Moradkhani, a well-known rights activist, spoke in a scathing video online two days after she was arrested in Iran for unknown reasons.
The video was shared by her France-based brother Mahmoud Moradkhani who also said his sister had been arrested after going to a prosecutor’s office following a summons.
"Oh free people, be with us and support us so that your governments stop supporting this murderous and child-killing regime," Moradkhani said, per CNN's translation.
The regime in Iran has waged a violent crackdown on protestors who are rising up over the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, who died in police custody after she was arrested for breaking strict hijab rules.
The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights Organization said at least 342 people including 43 children and 26 women have been killed by security forces in the ongoing nationwide protests.
This week, a rapper who backed the anti-government protests has been charged with "corruption on Earth" and could face the death penalty.
Ms Moradkhani said: "This regime is not loyal to any of its religious principles and does not know any rules except force and maintaining power.
"Now is the time for all free and democratic countries to recall their representatives from Iran as a symbolic gesture and to expel the representatives of this brutal regime from their countries."
She said people in Iran are fighting the regime’s "Satanic forces of evil" with remarkable courage and called on the world to support Iran’s "lions and lionesses" and to help prevent foreign governments from supporting the "murderous, child-killing" Iranian regime.
She went on to compare Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini to Hitler, Mussolini [Italian politician and founder of the Fascist party], Gaddafi [Libyan dictator], and Saddam Hussein[Iraq's former iron-fisted ruler].
She said: "Isn't the experience of Hitler, Mussolini, Ceaușescu, Qadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini, and, most recently, Khamenei, enough to make the world contemplate a new path?"
Ms Moradkhani is the daughter of Khamenei’s sister Badri, who fell out with her family in the 1980s and fled to Iraq at the height of the war with Iran’s neighbour.
Ms Moradkhani was last arrested in January this year following an October 2021 video conference in which she praised Farah Diba, the widow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was ousted by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
She was detained in the notorious Evin Prison and released on April 30, 2022.
