Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Iranians cut their hair and take to the streets of Iran to protest killing of 22-year-old Iranian lady, Mahsa Amini, by Islamic republic police after being seen not wearing her Hijab. (Read More Here).
More than 30 Iranians were injured, some seriously, while taking to the streets to protest after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman three days after she was arrested and reportedly beaten by morality police in Tehran.
The circumstances of Mahsa Amini’s death on Friday are hotly contested, but her family denied official reports that she suffered from epilepsy and instead claimed she was beaten by police.
She had been visiting Tehran with her brother when she was picked up by police outside a metro station and put into a van, for allegedly not complying with the country’s hijab regulations.
The controversy is now widening into a dispute not just about the enforcement of the hijab in cities, but the accountability of the morality police, as well as mistrust towards government denials of wrongdoing.
The horrific death, front page news in some Iranian newspapers, makes for a difficult backdrop for Ebrahim Raisi’s visit to New York for the UN general assembly.
His visit was already facing protests from human rights campaigners and Republicans opposed to Joe Biden taking any steps to reopen the Iran nuclear deal. Raisi has called for a report into Amini’s death.
Demonstrators initially gathered outside Kasra hospital in Tehran, where Amini died after she collapsed in the detention centre. Her body was then transported by plane to Saqqez in her native province of Kurdistan in north-west Iran for an emotional burial, which took place on Saturday.
The police tried to keep the numbers attending the funeral to a minimum, but 1,000 were reported to have been at the graveside. The protests then gathered outside the Saqqez governor’s office, where the violence occurred. Kurdish human rights groups reported that security forces deployed pepper spray against protesters, leading to more than 30 injuries.
There were also peaceful protests on Sunday at the faculty of fine arts at Tehran University, where a group of 100 students risked punishment and carried posters reading “women, life, freedom”, words that were also heard at her funeral.
The crisis has escalated partly due to the heavy-handed efforts by the authorities to deny responsibility, releasing edited video footage showing her collapsing in a police station.
The family have formally demanded the entire CCTV is released instead of the partial footage so far shown. The hospital said that Amini was brain dead when she arrived there.
“Resuscitation was performed on the patient, the heartbeat returned and the patient was admitted to the intensive care unit. Unfortunately, after 48 hours on Friday, the patient suffered a cardiac arrest again, due to brain death. Despite the efforts of the medical team, they failed to revive her and the patient died,” they said, in a statement that was deleted from the hospital’s Instagram account an hour later.
In a sign of official government concern about the incident and the public response, the interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, said an investigation was under way but insisted Amini had a history of medical problems stretching back to when she was five years old.
Ensieh Khazali, vice-president for women in the government, said on Twitter she had spoken directly to the family and expressed her condolences, and was urgently seeking clarification of the matter.
Her intervention led to a hail of critical replies, and accounts of other incidents where women had been beaten up for not wearing the hijab.
Al-Nashif condemned the reported unnecessary or disproportionate use of force against protesters, and called on Iran – as a State party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – to respect the right to peacefully exercise freedom of expression, assembly and association.
The Acting High Commissioner also echoed past deep concerns of the UN Secretary-General about the ongoing repression of women human rights defenders who object to compulsory veiling and the response of the authorities to protests against compulsory veiling.
