Women remove hijab in protest after woman dies for breaking dress code

Women in Iran have continued to protest over the weekend after the death of a 22-year old woman who was believed to have been beaten by the country’s morality police for not complying with mandatory dress codes requiring women to wear a hijab.

Crowds gathered on Saturday in the hometown of Mahsa Amini — who died last Friday after falling into a coma following her arrest in Tehran on Tuesday. Amini was travelling with family to the nation’s capital to visit relatives when she was arrested and put into a police van.

According to some witnesses, Amini was beaten in the van as she was being transported in to a detention centre.

The Tehran Police Department have denied these claims, saying instead that while Amini was being transferred to one of the police departments for “justification and education” about the hijab, she “suddenly suffered a heart problem.”

Iran’s sharia (Islamic law) mandates that all women cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes, with lawbreakers facing public condemnation, fines or arrest. 

Protests have spurred over the weekend in both the capital and in Amini’s hometown of Saqez — northwest of the country. 

At the University of Tehran, hundreds of protesters gathered, shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and “Death to the dictator”, challenging women to remove their veils in defiance of the country’s authoritarian oppression of women. 

On Saturday, at Amini’s funeral in Saqez, protesters were met by violent resistance from the police — according to videos posted online, one man sustained head injuries, though the videos were not authenticated by Reuters. 

An MP representing Saqez told reporters that some people were injured at the funeral. 

“One of them was hospitalised in the Saqez Hospital after being hit in the intestines by ballbearings,” Behzad Rahimi told  ILNA news agency. 

The online backlash to Amini’s death has been enormous and swift — #MahsaAmini has become one of the top hashtags on Persian-language Twitter. By Sunday afternoon, #MahsaAmini reached 1.63 million mentions on the platform. 

On the same day, Amini’s father told pro-reform Emtedad news website that he rejects the police’s narrative of what happened to her daughter. 

The police told him that her daughter had been taken to an intensive-care unit at Kasra hospital hours after her arrest and that she would be released after a “re-education session,” according to Hrana, an Iranian human rights organisation. 

“Authorities have said my daughter suffered from chronic medical conditions,” Amini’s father said. “I personally deny such claims as my daughter was fit and had no health problems.” 

He insists that Amini was in a coma after arriving at the hospital and told by hospital staff that she was brain dead.

Disturbing photographs of the victim lying in coma continue to circulate on social media.

Several high profile activists have publicly condemned her death, including Mahmoud Sadeghi, a reformist politician who called on the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to publicly address Amini’s case.

“What does the supreme leader, who rightfully denounced US police over the death of George Floyd, say about the Iranian police’s treatment of Mahsa Amini?” he tweeted on Friday.

Earlier this month, Iran’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi announced plans to increase the surveillance of women who do not comply with the strict hijab-wearing law. 

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, women have been required to wear the hijab head-covering when out in public. 

According to analysis by the World Economic Forum, Iran ranks 150 in the Global Gender Gap Index among the 156 countries in the world.