Iran says Mahsa Amini died of illness, not police assault

The Iranian regime released this Friday (7) the report of a coroner who lent itself to reinforce the official version that the death of the young Mahsa Amini, who was in the custody of the country’s moral police, is linked to a medical condition — and not, therefore, the aggressions of which she would have been the victim, according to her family and activists.

The death of the young Kurdish woman, detained in Tehran for allegedly not wearing the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, correctly, has set off a wave of protests that has lasted three weeks. With women and girls at the forefront and slogans against the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, the acts became the biggest demonstration of opposition to the regime in years.

In the face of brutal repression in Tehran, the demonstrations have already resulted in 154 deaths, according to the organization Human Rights in Iran, and hundreds of arrests. The regime accuses the US and Israel of being behind the action, in an attempt to destabilize the country, and denies that the young woman was attacked by the moral police.

“Mahsa Amini’s death was not caused by blows to the head or vital organs,” the coroner said in a statement released on Friday by the state agency IRNA. Without mentioning possible aggression, the document refers to a fainting of the young woman, when she was in custody, and attributes it to a pre-existing condition, citing a “surgical intervention due to a brain tumor when she was eight years old”.

According to the report, she regained consciousness but passed out again. “Due to ineffective cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the critical first few minutes, Amini suffered hypoxia [falha de oxigenação] severe and, as a result, brain damage, despite recovery of heart function.” The coroner then says that the condition led to multiple organ failure.

The Kurdish family denies that the young woman had medical problems. Her father blames the moral police for the death, saying she suffered blows to her legs and other parts of her body. The family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, said independent doctors attest that she was assaulted.

Amini was arrested in Tehran on Sept. 13 and taken to a police station “to be educated” about the strict dress code for women in force in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. She died three days later after falling into a coma.

Khamenei, 83, said this week that the young woman’s death “broke the hearts” of Iranians. “But what is not normal is that some people, without evidence or investigations, turn the streets into a danger, burn the Koran, women remove their veils and burn mosques and cars”, he said, referring to the repression of the acts, in the same way. in a way that the ultra-conservative president Ebrahim Raisi has done on other occasions.

Meanwhile, reports of abuses by the regime multiply. On Friday, authorities denied the accusation that security forces killed a 16-year-old girl during the crackdown on protests. According to the official version, also published by the Iranian media, the young woman committed suicide; Social media reports and a statement from Amnesty International claim that Sarina Esmaeilzadeh was killed with truncheons to the head.

The Justice of Alborz province, where the case took place, said that a preliminary investigation showed that she fell from the roof of a five-story building on the 24th. “Based on her mother’s account, Esmaeilzadeh had a history of attempts to suicide,” said a spokesperson.

Reuters was unable to contact the family. A video of the young woman smiling and listening to music was viewed nearly 150,000 times on the Twitter account 1500tasvir, which is dedicated to following the protests.

The case draws attention because it repeats the script of another that occurred earlier this week, to justify the death of Nika Shakarami, 17. Activists claim that the young woman died due to police aggression, which points out that she threw herself from a roof. .

State media said a judicial investigation had been opened into the death.