The son of Iran's president, who is also a government adviser, called on Saturday for internet connectivity to be restored, warning the more than two-week blackout there would exacerbate anti-government sentiment.
Yousef Pezeshkian, whose father Masoud was elected president in 2024, said "keeping the internet shut will create dissatisfaction and widen the gap between the people and the government".
"This means those who were not and are not dissatisfied will be added to the list of the dissatisfied," he wrote in a Telegram post that was later picked up by the official IRNA news agency.
Such a risk, he said, was greater than that of a return to protests if connectivity were restored.
Iran's more than 90 million people have been largely cut off from the internet since authorities imposed a blackout on January 8 amid major protests sweeping the country.
Under the cover of the blackout, they launched a deadly crackdown on protesters, with rights groups documenting several thousand dead and the Norway-based NGO Iran Human Rights saying the final figure could top 25,000.
The Iranian government has put the toll at 3,117, including 2,427 it has labelled "martyrs", a term used to distinguish members of the security forces and innocent bystanders from those described by authorities as "rioters" incited by the US and Israel.
The younger Pezeshkian, who is a media adviser to the presidency, said he did not know when access to the internet would be restored.
He pointed to concerns about the "release of videos and images related to last week's 'protests that turned violent'" as a reason the internet remained cut off, but criticised the logic.
Quoting a Persian proverb, he posted "'He whose account is clean has nothing to fear from scrutiny'".
The president's son blamed foreign interference for the protests' violent turn, but said "the security and law enforcement forces may have made mistakes that no one intends to defend and that must be addressed".
He went on to say that "the release of films is something we will have to face sooner or later. Shutting down the internet won't solve anything; it will just postpone the issue."
Source: AFP