Iranian teen dies weeks after mysterious fall on subway

Armita Geravand, a 16-year-old Iranian high school student, has died weeks after she collapsed and fell into a coma following what many believe was an encounter over not covering her hair in public.

Geravand's death, nearly a month after she was believed to have been shoved by officers for not wearing a headscarf on a subway car in Tehran, was announced by Iran's state news agency IRNA on Saturday. That report repeated the government line that Geravand's coma had been caused by hitting her head after a fainting spell.

Geravand's case has fueled outrage among many Iranians because of her young age and because of previous cases in which hundreds of women have been brutalized by the morality police for not wearing headscarves. In Geravand's case, Iranian authorities released only limited footage of the incident.

The circumstances of her case have prompted comparisons with Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman whose death in police custody in September 2022 led to the most significant wave of anti-government protests since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Amini's death touched off widespread, monthslong demonstrations in which Iranian women publicly violated dress codes, mostly by eschewing headscarves, in huge protests that rattled the country.

With international and domestic pressure mounting, Iran said in December that it was abolishing its morality police. But this summer, the government created a special unit to enforce laws in Iran that require women to cover their hair with a hijab and wear loosefitting robes.

Station camera footage released by the government captured only part of the incident involving Geravand. The video shows her entering the subway car with friends without wearing a headscarf. It then shows her friends pulling her unconscious body back onto the platform. Footage from inside the subway car was not released.

The story was reported by Farzad Seifikaran, a journalist with Zamaneh Media, an independent Persian-language news site, based in Amsterdam. He said people familiar with the incident had told him that Geravand and two of her friends had argued with officers enforcing the hijab rule and that one of them had pushed Geravand, who hit her head on a metal object as she fell.