16-year-old Armita Geravand is dead. “Unfortunately, she was in a coma for quite some time due to brain injuries. She died a few minutes ago,” Iran’s state news agency Irna reported on Saturday. According to human rights organizations, the Iranian woman was confronted by moral police on October 1 because she was not wearing a headscarf. After an alleged encounter with security forces, the girl fell into a coma and was declared brain dead last week.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had sharply criticized the moral police’s actions: “A young woman in Iran is fighting for her life again. Simply because she showed her hair in the subway,” Baerbock wrote on the online platform X (formerly Twitter ) and called the situation “unbearable.”
According to media reports, the girl was taken to a hospital after she fainted on the subway. The US news portal According to CNN Female morality police officers approached Geravand near Shohada subway station and asked her to adjust her hijab. There was then an argument in which the police officers reportedly physically attacked Geravand. “She was pushed and then collapsed,” CNN quoted an employee of the Norway-based human rights organization Hengaw as saying.
The authorities had rejected any connection with the intervention of the moral police. Meanwhile, state media spoke of an accident. It was said that Geravand lost her balance due to a drop in blood pressure and hit her head against the edge of the train. Her friends then carried her out of the subway car and called the emergency services.
Video footage from the state news agency Irna from the metro station is said to show the incident. It shows how some women wearing headscarves enter a subway car in the Tehran metro and just a few seconds later carry an unconscious person out again.
Pressure on family and journalists
After the parents of the deceased also spoke of an accident in an interview, the human rights organization Hengaw pointed out that the family had been intimidated. The interview was published on Iranian state television.
The hospital was also closely guarded, Hengaw reported, citing internal sources. A journalist who wanted to inquire about the young people’s health was temporarily arrested on the way to the hospital, the daily newspaper reported Sharg. Security forces also confiscated the phones of Geravand’s relatives.
Baerbock wrote on Platform
Parallels to the death of Mahsa Amini
Users wrote on social media that the case brought back memories of the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after a confrontation with the Iranian authorities. The young woman was returning from vacation with her family on September 13, 2022, back to Kurdistan. During a stopover in Tehran, she was arrested by the moral police because she was said to have not worn her hijab, the mandatory headscarf, correctly.
According to her younger brother, she was forcibly dragged into a police car and taken to a police station, where she collapsed a short time later and fell into a coma. When doctors at Tehran’s Kasra Hospital pronounced Amini dead three days later, the news sparked massive protests across the country.
They are considered the most serious uprisings in Iran in decades – women in particular, but also men, demonstrated against the hijab law and other discriminatory regulations under the motto “Woman, Life, Freedom”. The protests were suppressed by the state leadership, but flared up again on the first anniversary of Amini’s death on September 16, 2023.
Many women continue to resist the requirement to wear a headscarf as a sign of silent protest.