22-year-old woman dies in Iran after ‘moral detention’ for not wearing a headscarf

Iranian Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been detained by the police because she was allegedly not wearing the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, died on Friday (16), relatives and news outlets said. She was in a coma, and her case sparked virtual protests.

Police officers claimed that Amini suffered a heart attack after being detained on Tuesday (13) so that, in the words of the agents, she could be “convinced and polite”, and denied that she had been assaulted. Activists, however, claim that the police approach has been violent, often with the use of beatings against women.

In Iran, after the 1979 Revolution, which gave way to a theocratic regime, the law began to state that women are obliged to cover their hair with a veil and wear baggy clothes to cover the shape of their bodies. Those who break the rule face public reprimands, fines and even imprisonment.

The law has never ceased to be questioned, despite repression. Over the past few months, human rights activists have been influencing women to publicly remove their veils in protest against the dress code, which has angered government officials and security agents, who say the act constitutes immoral behavior.

The Iranian Interior Ministry and Tehran’s chief prosecutor said they had launched investigations into the Mahsa Amini case following a request from President Ebrahim Raisi, according to official media.

Footage aired on state TV showed a woman, identified as Amini, falling down after rising from a chair to speak to a police officer. The authenticity of the material, however, could not be independently confirmed.

The young woman’s brother, Kiarash, told Iran Wire that he was with her at the time of the arrest. The family, who are from Saqez, in the Iranian province of Kurdistan, were visiting the capital Tehran on the day. When he questioned the police, he would have heard that his sister would only stay at the police station for an hour, for “re-education classes”.

He then went to the scene, where he claims to have come across dozens of other women detained for similar reasons. From there, the sister left in an ambulance straight to the hospital. Kiarash said the family will seek justice for an investigation to be carried out.

Mahmoud Sadeghi, a former parliamentarian and ex-religion known for criticizing the ruling elite, charged that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaks out about Amini’s case.

In a social network, he recalled that Khamenei criticized the death of George Floyd, a former black security guard suffocated to death by a white police officer in the US, in 2020, when he said that the episode highlighted the “true nature of American rulers”. “.

Sadeghi then asked, “What does the supreme leader, who rightly denounced the US police for Floyd’s death, say about the Iranian police’s treatment of Mahsa Amini?”

Earlier this month, two Iranian lesbian activists were sentenced to death for “promoting homosexuality”. They were also accused of promoting the Christian religion and having contacted a media outlet that opposes the government.

On social media, Iranians have expressed their repudiation of the existence of the practice known as “moral detention”, perpetrated by so-called guidance patrols. Some videos shared show police officers detaining women, dragging them to the ground and forcibly taking them away.

According to a report by the British BBC network, Amini’s family claims that she was a healthy woman, with no health conditions that would explain a sudden heart problem. Relatives were only told that she had been taken to hospital hours after her arrest.