President Donald Trump expressed solidarity with Iranian protesters as they took to the streets of Tehran over the weekend, after the Islamic Republic admitted it accidentally shot down a Ukraine-bound airliner, killing all 176 people on board the Boeing aircraft.



Trump, in Twitter messages written in both Farsi and English Saturday, called on Tehran to allow human rights groups to report facts from the ground and warned the government that the "world is watching."

The president warned Iran's leaders on Sunday not to kill protesters and to let reporters move freely. Protests against the Iranian government in November led to a crackdown that resulted in hundreds of deaths, according to human rights groups.



Hundreds of protesters in Tehran chanted anti-government slogans against the Islamic Republic's leaders on Saturday, according to Iran's semi-official Fars news agency. The protesters, who numbered between 700 to 1,000, tore up pictures of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq last week.



Video clips posted on Twitter showed protesters chanting "Death to the dictator" in reference to the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Reuters.



The protests come after Iran's military admitted that Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 was shot down by Iranian missiles due to "human error." Iran's government previously said it was not responsible for the crash, dismissing allegations that its missiles had downed the plane as "a big lie."



Tehran reversed its position as international pressure mounted. According to the Iranian military, the Revolutionary Guard Corps was on high alert amid tensions with the U.S. over the killing of Soleimani. The airline took off just minutes after Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said ballistic missile attacks on two U.S. bases in Iraq had ended, according to flight tracking data.