Armita Garawand fell into a coma in controversial circumstances in early October, in the Tehran metro. The Iranian high school student died this Saturday, local media announced. “Armita Garawand, a student residing in Tehran, died an hour ago after intensive medical treatment and 28 days of hospitalization in the special care unit,” announced the Borna agency, affiliated with the Ministry of Youth and Sports.
Aged 16 and from a Kurdish region, the teenager had been hospitalized at Fajr hospital in Tehran since October 1 after fainting in the capital’s metro. The circumstances of this malaise are controversial. The authorities claimed that the teenager had been the victim of a “loss of tension” and denied any “verbal or physical altercation” between her “and passengers or metro executives”.
An “attack” by the moral police
On Saturday, the local Tasnim agency cited the “official opinion of doctors” that the girl had “suffered a fall leading to brain damage, followed by continuous convulsions, decreased cerebral oxygenation and a cerebral edema, after a sudden drop in blood pressure.
But according to NGOs, the high school student was seriously injured during an “attack” on the part of members of the moral police, responsible for enforcing the obligation for Iranian women to wear the veil in public.
The shadow of Mahsa Amini
This case came a little more than a year after the death in detention, on September 16, 2022, of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd arrested by the moral police for allegedly violating sexist clothing rules imposed on women in Iran.
This death triggered a vast protest movement in the country which left several hundred dead, including law enforcement officers, and led to the arrest of thousands of people.