Protests spread in Iran over woman’s death
PARIS: Protests have spread across Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini ater the young woman was arrested by the morality police, as a rights group said on Wednesday two more protesters were killed overnight, raising the toll to six.
Public anger has flared since Iranian authorities on Friday announced the death of 22-year-old Amini, who had been held for allegedly wearing a hijab headscarf in an “improper” way.
Activists said the woman, whose Kurdish name is Jhina, had suffered a fatal blow to the head, a claim denied by officials in the Islamic republic who said they had launched an investigation.
Some women demonstrators have defiantly taken off their hijabs and burned them in bonfires or symbolically cut their hair, video footage spread virally on social media has shown.
State media reported on Wednesday that, in a fith night of street rallies that had spread to 15 cities, police used tear gas and made arrests to disperse crowds of up to 1,000 people.
Demonstrators hurled stones at security forces, set fire to police vehicles and rubbish bins and chanted anti-government slogans, the official IRNA news agency said.
Rights group Article 19 said it was “deeply concerned by reports of the unlawful use of force by Iranian police and security forces” including the use of live ammunition.
Overnight rallies were held in Tehran and other cities including Mashhad in the northeast, Tabriz in the northwest, Rasht in the north, Isfahan in the centre and Shiraz in the south, IRNA reported.
“Death to the dictator” and “Woman, life, freedom,” protesters could be heard shouting in video footage that spread beyond Iran, despite online restrictions reported by internet access monitor Netblocks.
In Iran, the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke publicly on Wednesday, but without mentioning the spreading unrest, and the ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi was to speak later in the day at the UN General
Assembly in New York.
Ismail Zarei Koosha, the governor of Kurdistan province - where Amini lived and where the protests started - said on Tuesday that three people had been killed during protests.
He insisted they were “killed suspiciously” as part of “a plot by the enemy,” Fars news agency reported. The Norway-based Kurdish human rights group Hengaw - which had first reported those three deaths - said on Wednesday that two more protesters had been killed overnight.