A 22-year-old Iranian woman has died in hospital after being stopped by the police under the pretense that she did not respect the country's hijab rules.
Mahsa Amini was traveling with her family from Iran's western province of Kurdistan to the capital, Tehran, to visit her relatives there. During this time, he was arrested simply because he did not follow the country's strict rule: the women's dress code.
Witnesses have reported that the girl was brutally raped in the police van, but the latter deny such a claim.
The news comes weeks after Iran's president, Ebrahim Raisi, ordered a crackdown on women's rights and called for stricter enforcement of the country's mandatory dress code, which requires women to wear headscarves to cover their breasts. of the head, since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Amin's family was notified that she had been taken to the hospital a few hours after her arrest. According to Hrana - an organization that protects human rights, testifies that the girl's family was told during the arrest that she would be released after a "re-education session".
Mahsa Amini went into a coma shortly before she died, while police said the girl suffered a heart attack. Meanwhile, her family denies any such thing, showing that she was completely healthy and never had such problems.
Pictures of the deceased, lying in a hospital bed in a coma and with a bandage around her head, are circulating on social networks.
Her death sparked many reactions from celebrities and politicians regarding such extreme decisions and rules that lead to a tragedy like this. Mahmoud Sadeghi, a reformist politician and former lawmaker, called on the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to speak openly about Amini's case.
"What does the supreme leader, who rightly denounced the American police for the death of George Floyd, say about the Iranian police's treatment of Mahsa Amin?" he wrote through a Twitter status.
On August 15, Raisi ordered harsher penalties for women who do not respect the dress code and appear without a hijab, both in public and online. Recently, women there have been repeatedly arrested, and even one of them, Sepideh Rashno (writer and artist) was tortured and beaten by the police until she was forced to publicly apologize on screen.
Source: The Guardian
