The death of a 22-year-old Iranian woman in police custody for allegedly breaching the country’s strict female dress code has generated furious protests over the Islamic Republic’s so-called morality laws at a time when more women are flouting such rules.
Hundreds of mourners turned out for the funeral of Mahsa Amini in her hometown in northwestern Iran on Saturday, a day after she died in a Tehran hospital. Protests erupted in the town, Saqqez, with demonstrators tearing down a poster of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, according to videos shown by US-funded news organisation Radio Farda.
Police responded with teargas and fired pellets to disperse protesters in Saqqez, according to footage shown by Radio Farda and Kurdish human-rights organisation Hengaw. Several protesters and police officers suffered minor injuries, authorities said. On Friday and Saturday, authorities shut down the internet in parts of the country, said Netblocks, an internet observatory that monitors global traffic outages, a tactic Iran’s government has used to prevent protests from spreading.
President Ebrahim Raisi has ordered the Interior Ministry to investigate Amini’s death, state media said. Iranian police have denied that Amini was physically mistreated.
Amini’s death and the resulting outrage highlights how restrictions on women have been able to galvanise opposition to the government in Iran, where a large secular population is ruled by ultraconservative Islamic clerics. Iranian celebrities, athletes and politicians have called for shutting down the morality police, saying her death should be a turning point.
Read the article by Aresu Eqbali and Benoit Faucon in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).