Iran Police Chief Denies the Police Truck Incident

Among several protesters who have been killed on December 27th 2009 during the Ashura protest, probably the most horrible scene was the one in which two police trucks passing a body of a protester on the ground. The first video of this incident posted on Youtube on the same day

From that day until Wednesday December 30th 2009, in two separate interviews, Iran's Police chief and his second in command, Sardar Radan, denied the involvement of any Police car in this incident.

These strange denies after 3 days of the incident, led BBC Persia to air the interview of the police chief and the video of the incident at the same time. Also CNN aired the video on Wednesday December 30th 2009.

Even though after airing of the video by BBC and CNN, the police came out saying the vehicle was stolen, but the question is how the police commanders in Iran allow themselves to be such a fool in denying an undeniable horrible scene.

I have thought of three possible answers for this question. First, the Iranian police and the Iranian government in general suffer serious degrees of ignorance. Probably, they have think that they have passed the point of damage control. Or they don't even care about their image anymore.

Second, I think they also lack of enough experience and knowledge of police work. After all, the commander was the head of Basij Militia without enough history in the police. This contributes to the degree of the ignorance that was mentioned before. These guys simply forget that almost any body on the streets of Tehran has a camera phone.

And third explanation is that they are trying to cover up something. One thing that they don't want to accept is that the police trucks were escaping from the scene. But I am afraid that they are covering up something more serious. If you look at the video aired by CNN again, one of the two trucks has a kind of tainted glass windows. Maybe it is the poor quality of the video that shows the windows in dark. But if we assume that the truck had unusual tainted windows, then it might be reasonable to consider the possibility of presence of some high ranks police officials in that truck. And probably that was the thing that the two police chiefs were trying to cover up.

Unless they explain who were driving those trucks, both Iran's highest ranks police chiefs are directly responsible for the killing in this incident.