Ahmadi was shocked by the injuries he saw on January 9. Protesters who had not dared to go to regular hospitals for fear of being identified and arrested flocked to his makeshift clinic, he tells The Guardian. They had gunshot and knife wounds to their chests, eyes and genitals. Many died.
From a medical point of view, the injuries we saw show boundless brutality - both in scope and in method, says the doctor.
With the regime's internet and phone shutdowns, no one knew what was happening in the rest of Iran. In an attempt to grasp the extent of the violence, Ahmadi, whose real name is something else but whose identity has been confirmed by The Guardian, assembled a network of 80 doctors in twelve different Iranian provinces.
Hasty funerals
Ahmadi and his colleagues cannot provide an exact death toll, but estimate that the number of dead could exceed 30,000. That is around ten times more than the regime in Tehran has officially admitted, but the same figure as sources within the country's health ministry previously gave to Time.
The calculations are complicated by the internet being down, but also by the regime's attempts to hide the extent of the violence. Several eyewitnesses tell The Guardian of "piles of dead" that have been hastily buried and "hundreds of bodies" that seem to have disappeared from forensic institutes.
At one morgue, staff recounted how they were forced to turn away two trucks full of bodies because they didn't have the capacity to take any more. When they tried to investigate where the bodies had been taken, they discovered that none of the major facilities in the region had accepted them.
Had catheters
A witness describes how authorities pushed for hasty mass burials of hundreds of unidentified bodies in Karaj, just west of Tehran. The dead arrived in small trucks usually transporting fruit and vegetables.
"I saw bodies in these trucks that were so stuck together that it took strength to pull them apart. The blood was still fresh and dried when they were piled up," reads a written testimony seen by The Guardian.
Another witness in Karaj tells how he searched for a killed friend among "hundreds of piled-up bodies" - and was told by staff that they had been ordered to put "thousands" of dead people in mass graves.
Some of the victims, many of whom were shot in the head, had catheters and intubation tubes attached to their bodies, according to staff at forensic institutes in two Iranian cities.
This suggests that they were killed while they were still being cared for, says Ahmadi.
