A few weeks back, women’s rights activists around the world felt a blow to the heart of universal empowerment after Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi spearheaded stricter regulations for women in the country.
Fast forward to the past week, and a young woman lost her life after she reportedly failed to meet dress code regulations and was arrested. She was just 22-years-old.
According to CNN, Mahsa Amini had travelled from Kurdistan to Tehran, the country’s capital, to visit her relatives. What should’ve been a simple journey turned into a devastating one after she and her family were stopped by ‘morality police’.
The morality police arrested Mahsa due to her having an “improper” hijab, per Human Rights Watch, and informed her brother (who was with her at the time) that they were taking his sister to their headquarters for an “educational and orientation class.”
Her brother had waited outside the headquarters where the ‘education’ revealed screaming. Other women who left the facility shared upon their exit that they believed someone had been killed there.
The Police Information Centre says that Mahsa suffered a seizure and had been taken to the hospital. Some reports say that the police called it a heart attack. Neither story made sense to the family, who as reported by the Guardian, contested that she was a healthy woman who didn’t have any medical complications.
The family was notified of their daughter being in hospital where pictures of her with bandages around her head made their way to social media causing public outrage, as many believed the police had beaten her to that state. She was reportedly declared brain dead by the hospital.
State media reporters shared a video that allegedly shows ‘Mahsa’ at the ‘orientation’, ‘collapsing’. However, as CNN pointed out, there is a continuity issue with the video, where a cut changes the scene from daylight to darkness, implying that it could’ve been fiddled with. It’s also not known if the woman in the video is even Mahsa.
Given that there have been numerous recent cases of “unlawful force” against women for the stricter dress code and hijab laws, many suspect that the video was conducted to cover the authorities’ tracks.
Investigations have been called on by political figures and activists worldwide. A movement of Iranian women has begun in her honour where women are cutting their hair and burning their hijabs to protest her death.
Iranian women show their anger by cutting their hair and burning their hijab to protest against the killing of #Mahsa_Amini by hijab police.
From the age of 7 if we don’t cover our hair we won’t be able to go to school or get a job. We are fed up with this gender apartheid regime pic.twitter.com/nqNSYL8dUb— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 18, 2022
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