Iranian teen dies weeks after being injured on Tehran subway while not wearing headscarf
An Iranian teenage girl injured weeks ago in a mysterious incident on Tehran’s Metro while not wearing a headscarf has died, state media reported Saturday.
The death of Armita Geravand comes after her being in a coma for weeks in Tehran and after the one-year anniversary of the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini which sparked nationwide protests at the time.
Geravand’s Oct. 1 injury and now her death threaten to reignite that popular anger, particularly as women in Tehran and elsewhere still defy Iran’s mandatory headscarf, or hijab, law as a sign of their discontent with Iran’s theocracy.
“Armita’s voice has been forever silenced, preventing us from hearing her story,” wrote the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran. “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.”
It added: “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.”
Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency reported Geravand’s death, without noting the wider unrest surrounding the headscarf law. Geravand suffered her injury at the Meydan-E Shohada, or Martyrs’ Square, Metro station in southern Tehran.
“Unfortunately, the brain damage to the victim caused her to spend some time in a coma and she died a few minutes ago,” the IRNA report read. “According to the official theory of Armita Geravand’s doctors, after a sudden drop in blood pressure, she suffered a fall, a brain injury, followed by continuous convulsions, decreased cerebral oxygenation and a cerebral edema.”
What happened in the few seconds after Armita Geravand entered the train on Oct. 1 remains in question. While a friend told Iranian state television that she hit her head on the station’s platform, the soundless footage aired by the broadcaster from outside of the car is blocked by a bystander. Just seconds later, her limp body is carried off.
Iranian state TV’s report, however, did not include any footage from inside the train itself and offered no explanation on why it hadn’t been released. Most train cars on the Tehran Metro have multiple CCTV cameras, which are viewable by security personnel.
Geravand’s parents appeared in state media footage saying a blood pressure issue, a fall or perhaps both contributed to their daughter’s injury.
Activists abroad have alleged Geravand may have been pushed or attacked for not wearing the hijab. They also demanded an independent investigation by the United Nations’ fact-finding mission on Iran, citing the theocracy’s use of pressure on victims’ families and state TV’s history of airing hundreds of coerced confessions.
The Associated Press has not been able to confirm the exact circumstances of what caused Geravand’s injuries.
The Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, which reports on abuses in Iran’s western Kurdish region and earlier published a photograph of Geravand in a coma, renewed its calls Saturday for an independent international investigation citing “the practice of the Islamic Republic in concealing the truth.”
“During the last 28 days, the Islamic Republic of
Iran tried to distort the narrative of the government murder of this teenage girl,” the group alleged. The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights similarly called for an investigation.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah “Ali Khamenei is personally responsible for Armita Garavand’s death unless an independent international investigation proves otherwise,” said
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the group’s director.
Geravand’s injury and subsequent death also comes as Iran has put its morality police — whom activists implicate in Amini’s death — back on the street, and as lawmakers push to enforce even stricter penalties for those flouting the required head covering. Internationally, Geravand’s injury sparked renewed criticism of Iran’s treatment of women and of the mandatory hijab law.
Amini died in a hospital on Sept. 16, 2022, after she was detained by Iranian morality police on allegations of improperly wearing the hijab. Suspicions that she was beaten during her arrest led to mass protests that represented the largest challenge to Iran’s theocratic government since the revolution.
Since those large-scale protests subsided, many women in Tehran could be seen without the hijab in defiance of the law.
For observant Muslim women, the head covering is a sign of piety before
God and modesty in front of men outside their families. In Iran, the hijab — and the all-encompassing black chador worn by some — has long been a political symbol as well, particularly after becoming mandatory in the years following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iran and Afghanistan are the only countries where the hijab remains mandatory for women.
Archeologists are hoping that an ancient map, left largely unstudied for 4,000 years, can point them towards some hidden secrets of the ancient world.
The Bronze Age map, at first look, is just a piece of rock etched with mysterious markings. But it turns out, the so-called “SaintBelec slab” could lead archaeologists to lost monuments in northwestern France, French news agency Agence France-Presse reported.
“Using the map to try to find archaeological sites is a great approach. We never work like that,” Yvan Pailler, a professor at the University of Western Brittany, told AFP. “It’s a treasure map.”
Usually, archeologists use technology such as radar equipment and aerial photography to make discoveries.
But this ancient map may prove just as effective. The Saint-Belec slab was declared Europe’s oldest map in 2021, and ever since, archaeologists have been trying to decipher its markings, to lead them to other archaeological finds. It was first discovered in 1900, but the historian who found it did not understand its importance, AFP reported.
Then in 2014, Pailler and his colleague, Clement Nicolas from the CNRS research institute, rediscovered the artifact, that had been stored in a museum, and began to take a closer look at its markings.
“There were a few engraved symbols that made sense right away,” Pailler told the news agency.
Researchers have so far discovered that the map spans an area of around 18 miles by 13 miles.
Archaeologists believe the territory covered by the map may have once been an ancient kingdom. The entire area will have to be surveyed and cross-referenced before more exploration can be done-a job that will take around 15 years to complete.
The areas include the mountains of Roudouallec, in the Brittany region of France. The researchers also decoded rivers marked on the slabs in the form of bumps and lines on the rock.
When they compared the map with modern ones, it was an 80 percent match.
“We still have to identify all the geometric symbols, the legend [key] that goes with them,” Nicolas said.