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Ever since the crackdown on protests in Iran between January 8 and 10, there has been contention on what the true death toll of those bloody events is. According to figures provided by the Iranian government, 3,117 people were killed, including civilians and security forces. Yet estimates from outside the country have put the number at anywhere between 5,000 and a staggering 36,500.

This wide range not only reflects the fact that it has been extremely difficult to verify these reports, but also that there has been a concerted effort to use the death count to manufacture global consent for an attack on Iran and, in a deceitful rhetoric, downplay the official death toll of the genocide in Gaza.

Since the outbreak of the protests, there has been a race to estimate and report on the casualties – something I call a “Death Toll Olympics”.

Iran-focused human rights organisations led by dissident activists have been going through all sorts of evidence and testimonies to verify the number of the dead. As of writing this piece, the US-based organisation HRANA (Human Rights Activists News Agency) has cited more than 6,000 deaths and a further 17,000-plus cases under examination.

However, there are valid doubts about the speed of the activist-led verification process.

For every reported death, multiple accounts have to be examined, possible duplications must be identified and eliminated; and dates, locations and specific circumstances must be cross-checked against the timeline of events.

Furthermore, any visual evidence has to be localised and authenticated based on open-source data or corroborated by the accounts of multiple witnesses. From an investigative standpoint, the reliability and quality of activist-led counts that increase rapidly on a daily basis, therefore warrants caution.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, has cited a conservative estimate of around 5,000 deaths. At the same time, she has mentioned that unverified numbers of up to 20,000 have been reported to her by medical sources.

The described obstacles, and difficulties of verification over the past weeks, have been further exacerbated by Iran’s severely restricted internet access. Despite this, major media outlets have begun distributing much higher figures, solely based on vague anonymous sources who claim privileged access within Iran’s government or health sector.

On January 25, for example, UK-based TV network Iran International published a report claiming 36,500 were killed, citing “extensive reports” allegedly obtained from the Iranian security apparatus – reports it has neither published nor otherwise made transparent.

The same day, United States news magazine Time published an article titled “Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30,000, According to Local Health Officials”. It claimed that “as many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone” based on the accounts of two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health, whose identities were not revealed for security reasons. Notably, the magazine admitted in the text that it did not possess any means to independently confirm that number.

Two days later, British newspaper The Guardian followed the same trend with an article titled “Disappeared bodies, mass burials and ‘30,000 dead’: what is the truth of Iran’s death toll?” The piece introduced the figure of 30,000 based on estimates of an anonymous doctor, who spoke to the newspaper. He and his colleagues in Iran, the outlet admitted, were actually hesitant to provide a concrete figure.

Other media – from the Sunday Times to the Pierce Morgan Uncensored show – have cited papers circulated by Germany-based ophthalmologist Amir Parasta claiming death toll numbers between 16,500 and 33,000. However, the latest available version of the paper, dating back to January 23 uses disputable extrapolation methods to reach its figures. Strikingly, Parasta does not make any secret of his affiliation with Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s ousted Shah

The exiled crown prince and his team, whose extensive social media manipulation and disinformation efforts have been exposed by recent investigations by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and University of Toronto’s The Citizen Lab, have been key actors in inciting and escalating the recent protests towards confrontation. Accordingly, the fatality numbers disseminated by Mr Parasta cannot be perceived as neutral and constitute partisan estimates at best.

Despite acknowledging their own inability to verify these estimates, the media in question nevertheless put these extreme figures in titles and subheadings. It didn’t take long for other outlets to report on these inflated numbers, referring to these major publications as primary sources. Activists and Western politicians have also used them to push their respective agendas, thereby further fuelling a spiral of disinformation campaigns on social media. – In other words, a “death toll olympics” was born.

All of this has served two ends.

First, it has supported efforts to manufacture consent for foreign military intervention and malicious political action. While the protests were still ongoing, US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened military action against Iran in the event of a deadly crackdown. As of writing these lines, there has been a significant US military build-up around Iran, effectively thickening the war cloud.

Second, the speculation about the Iranian death toll has helped pro-Israel politicians and commentators in the West to downplay the casualties of the Israeli war on Gaza. In this way, it has become a utilitarian tool for relativising the genocide of the Palestinian people.

Confronted with mounting pressure regarding the death toll, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered the authorities to “publicly publish the names and personal data of those deceased during the recent bitter incidents”. His director of communication has even promised that a procedure has been set up to examine and verify any conflicting claims.

It remains to be seen how effective and transparent the promised procedure will turn out. It is undeniable that thousands have been killed in Iran, mostly by Iranian security forces, amid a multi-day brutal crowd and riot control effort.

Structural obscurity and the restricted access to Iran for independent experts will likely mean that the exact death toll will never be determined. However, the more transparency can be established regarding the scale of the killings, the more likely it is that the perpetrators can be held accountable.

An arduous verification process of the recent deaths is crucial not only for the sake of accountability, but also to expose the media manipulation that is once again preparing the ground for a unilateral US-led act of aggression in the Middle East. In light of this, the “Death Toll Olympics” remains an ignominious disservice to the wretched of the Earth from Palestine to Iran.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

A Los Angeles County judge ruled Wednesday that a corruption case against L.A. City Councilman Curren Price can move forward to trial, ensuring the misconduct scandal will hang over the veteran politician’s final year in office.

L.A. County Superior Court Judge Shelly Torrealba determined that prosecutors had provided enough evidence to move forward on four counts of voting on matters in which Price had a conflict of interest, four counts of embezzlement and four counts of perjury.

Price, who is set to leave the City Council after reaching his term limit at the end of the year, declined to comment after the hearing.

The councilman, who has represented South L.A. for more than a decade, was charged in June 2023. Prosecutors allege Price repeatedly voted to approve sales of land to developers or funding for agencies who had done business with his wife, Del Richardson, and her consulting company. Some of the votes involved funding and grants for the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city housing authority.

Price, 75, is also accused of perjury for failing to include Richardson’s income on disclosure forms and embezzlement for including her on his city health insurance plan before they were legally married. He is due back in court in March, Torrealba said.

Richardson was named as a “suspect” in the district attorney’s office’s initial investigation in 2022, according to documents made public last year, but she was never charged with a crime. She has been among a group of Price’s supporters who have been in court for the past week. The two wore matching burgundy suits during Wednesday’s hearing.

Much of the weeklong proceeding centered around whether Price knew of potential conflicts of interest before casting votes, or intended to hide his financial stakes in them from the public. Delphi Smith, a former staffer for the councilman, and Price’s deputy chief of staff Maritza Alcaraz took the stand to explain the process they used to flag problematic council votes for Price and insisted they made their best efforts to highlight agenda items linked to vendors or agencies who had worked with Richardson.

“If the Councilman voted on something that was a potential conflict, he did so without knowing,” Alcaraz testified Wednesday.

L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Casey Higgins, however, said Price is ultimately responsible for disclosing conflicts of interest and argued blaming his subordinates was not a defense to corruption charges.

“It’s not only hiding. It’s trying to create a wall around himself, to create this plausible deniability,” Higgins said. “It’s this ostrich with his head in the sand approach.”

Higgins said Alcaraz and Smith were “trying to jump in front of the bus” and that it was impossible to believe that Price had no knowledge of the conflicts. The dealings allegedly took place between 2019 and 2021 — after a 2019 Times investigation revealed he voted on decisions involving at least 10 companies in the same years they were listed as providing at least $10,000 in income to Richardson’s firm.

Price’s defense attorney, Michael Schafler, has argued there is no evidence that Price knew of the conflicts, and claimed payments to Richardson had no influence on Price’s voting decisions. All of the votes referenced in the criminal complaint passed with overwhelming support, and Price’s vote made no difference in the final result.

“There’s been no evidence presented that Mr. Price acted with any wrongful intent. No testimony from any witness … who said Mr. Price acted with willful intent,” Schafler said Wednesday. “I’ve never seen a public corruption case like that in my life.”

There were enormous sums of money on the line in each vote referenced in the criminal complaint. Richardson took in more than a half-million from October 2019 to June 2020 from the city housing authority before Price voted in favor of millions in grant funding for the agency, according to an amended complaint filed against Price last year.

Prosecutors also alleged Price wrote a motion to give $30 million to the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority during a time frame when Richardson was paid upward of $200,000 by the agency.

After Torrealba’s ruling, Schafler said he was “disappointed” but thought the evidence presented over the past week revealed that “the prosecution’s case has a lot of gaps, a lot of holes, it’s based largely on speculation.”

Some of Price’s City Council colleagues have said Price’s alleged crimes were tantamount to paperwork errors, and should have been handled by the city’s Ethics Commission.

While questioning former employees of Price and Richardson, Higgins sought to paint a more nefarious picture. He repeatedly scrutinized the way that Price’s staff and a former employee of Del Richardson & Associates compiled a list of the firm’s projects that could represent conflicts and communicated about them.

Much of the conflict information was placed on a flash drive and given to Smith in person by Martisa Garcia, an employee of Richardson, Higgins said. Updates to the file were then made over the phone, and not discussed via e-mail, according to Higgins. When Smith and Alcaraz discussed votes in which Price might have to recuse himself, they did so on personal phones rather than city-issued devices, according to evidence Higgins put forth.

Higgins suggested Price’s staff was trying to hide the conflicts of interest.

“Was the thumb drive used to avoid public records requests?” Higgins asked Alcaraz, who curtly replied “No.”

Generally speaking, California Public Records Act requests for an elected official’s communications will only capture what is contained on government devices, not personal phones or e-mails. A spokeswoman for Price, Angelina Valenica, said there was no “intent to avoid PRA requirements” on the part of Price’s staff.

“The Councilmember was not involved in the handling, transport or storage of this information,” she said. “He relied on and trusted his staff to handle the matter appropriately and to seek guidance as necessary.”

While it’s unlikely Price will stand trial before his term runs out, the case could loom large over the race to replace him. A field of seven candidates is running for his council seat, including Price’s deputy chief of staff, Jose Ugarte, who has faced allegations that he failed to disclose consulting income that are similar to the basis of the perjury charges against his boss.

Chris Martin, a candidate and civil rights attorney with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, said Wednesday that if the allegations are true, Price and his staff need to step down.

“It’s a serious breach of public trust. It’s important that we have leaders in the 9th District who will walk with integrity,” Martin said. “It also seems like he’s got a major issue with his staff enabling him. They should all resign.”