Iranian Girl, 16, Dies After Being Beaten by Regime’s Morality Police for Not Wearing Headscarf on Subway

The parents of a 16-year-old girl who died after allegedly being beaten by Iran’s morality police for not properly covering her hair on Tehran’s metro buried their daughter Sunday.Armita Geravand had been in a coma for weeks following the incident at the Meydan-E Shohada, or Martyrs’ Square, Metro station in southern Tehran. Iran’s State-run media, which reported the death Saturday, blamed it on a head injury resulting from a fall on the station platform. She was removed from life support in recent days.Geravand’s death comes one year after the death of another woman at the hands of the morality police, Mahsa Amini, sparked nationwide protests against the zealots who control Iran and the treatment of women in the country. Human rights groups outside of Iran say the young woman was pushed or attacked by the morality police and have demanded an independent investigation of her death by the United Nations, citing the theocratic regime’s history of pressuring victims’ families and the state-run television of airing coerced testimony.Television reports aired in Iran said Geravand hit her head on the station’s platform after suffering from a rapid loss in blood pressure. CCTV footage of the incident showed her body being carried out of a train car, but nothing from inside the vehicle. Most train cars on the Tehran Metro have multiple CCTV cameras.Shortly after the subway incident, authorities isolated Garavand’s family members and attempted to prevent journalists from reaching them. “Armita’s voice has been forever silenced, preventing us from hearing her story,” the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran said in a statement. “Yet we do know that in a climate where Iranian authorities severely penalize women and girls for not adhering to the state’s forced-hijab law, Armita courageously appeared in public without one.”“As long as the Iranian government enforces its draconian mandatory hijab law, the lives of girls and women in Iran will hang in the balance, vulnerable to severe rights violations, including violence and even death,” the group added.Iran’s leaders stopped regular patrols of the morality police following the protests over the death of Amini one year ago, but the patrols were restarted recently after lawmakers in the country began pushing for even stricter penalties for those flouting the required head covering.Videos published on social media Sunday showed mourners dressed in black gathering at the Behesht Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran for Geravand’s funeral. Family members told foreign press outlets that state security officials refused their request to bury the young woman in her native village in the western province of Kermanshah, a heavily Kurdish region and a hotbed of earlier protests over the death of Amini.An imprisoned Iranian activist, Narges Mohammadi, won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month in recognition of her campaigns for women’s rights and democracy, and against the death penalty, in Iran. The Iranian government criticized her awarding of the prize as a political stunt, without acknowledging its own decadeslong campaign targeting Mohammadi for her work.

Iranian Girl, 16, Dies After Being Beaten by Regime’s Morality Police for Not Wearing Headscarf on Subway

Iranian Girl, 16, Dies After Being Beaten by Regime’s Morality Police for Not Wearing Headscarf on Subway

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