Iranian Girl in Coma After Cops Remove Her From Train Because She Wasn’t Wearing a Hijab
According to rights organizations, a 16-year-old Iranian girl is battling for her life after an alleged attack by police officials who hauled her from the Tehran Metro for disobeying the hijab legislation. The episode happened a year after Mahsa Amini’s tragic death, which incited outcry all over the world.
Armita Garawand, the victim, is a resident of Tehran but is originally from the Kurdish-populated western Iranian city of Kermanshah. She is now in a coma and receiving treatment at the hospital under tight security.
The boy was reportedly seriously hurt after an altercation with female police officers on the Tehran subway, according to the Kurdish-focused rights organization Hengaw.
Iranian officials, however, have denied these claims, claiming that the child “fainted” owing to low blood pressure and that no security agents were involved.
An alleged video of the event shows the youngster being forced into the metro by female police officers while accompanied by companions and seeming to be exposed, followed by the removal of an immobilized corpse.
Hengaw said that Garawand had serious injuries as a result of being physically assaulted and seized by members of Tehran’s so-called morality police on Sunday at the Shohada metro station. It said that the woman was receiving treatment in Tehran’s Fajr hospital under strict security and that “no visits are currently permitted for the victim, not even from her family.”
AUTHORITIES IN IRAN ON HIGH ALERT
The episode put Iranian authorities on high alert for any escalation of societal unrest. Several months of protests that shook Iran’s clerical leadership last year over the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been detained for allegedly breaking the strict dress code for women, only dwindled in the face of a crackdown that, in the eyes of activists, resulted in thousands of arrests and hundreds of deaths.
The managing director of the Tehran subway system, Masood Dorosti, denied that there had been “any verbal or physical conflict” between the student and “passengers or metro executives”. Dorosti informed the official news agency IRNA that “some rumors about a confrontation with metro agents… are not true and CCTV footage refutes this claim.”
She received a “head injury” after being shoved by the cops, according to a source quoted by the non-Iranian news outlet IranWire.
Iranian authorities have stepped up their efforts to punish women who disobey the Islamic republic’s stringent clothing codes for women, including the need to wear the headscarf, a year after Amini’s murder.
Women and children “face increased violence, arbitrary detentions, and heightened discrimination after the Islamic Republic reactivated its forced-veiling police patrols,” according to the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).
