A 16-year-old girl is hospitalized in a coma in Tehrancapital of Iranafter allegedly being attacked by the capital’s metro authorities for not wearing the veil properly, according to human rights groups.
The young woman Armita Garavand She was the victim of “a physical assault” last Sunday in the capital’s subway for not covering her hair and since then she has been in a coma in intensive care at a Fajr hospital in the Iranian capital. This was reported by the Kurdish human rights organization Hengaw, based in Oslo.
Garavand, 16, fainted when she entered one of the Tehran subway cars, where she was with two friends, all of them unveiled, according to video footage broadcast by state media. Security images released by IRNA show how the three young women wait for the metro to arrive at the Shahada Square station. When the convoy arrives they enter one of the cars and then two of them leave carrying the third. No images of what is happening inside the car have been made public. The young woman has been admitted to Fajr Hospital since then, and according to Hengaw.
The authorities deny the attack
For their part, those responsible for the metro have denied that any incident occurred and have attributed fainting due to “a drop in blood pressure”. “Rumors of a confrontation with metro staff are not true and surveillance images refute these claims,” Tehran Metro director Masood Dorosti told the official IRNA agency. Dorosti denied that any “physical or verbal conflict” occurred between the young woman and metro staff.
However, after the alleged incident reporter Maryam Lotfi from the reformist newspaper Shargh He went to the hospital where the young woman is admitted to report the situation and She was arrested on Monday by authorities, according to the newspaper itself. Lotfi was released hours after being arrested, Shargh said.
The Mahsa Amini case
He died a little over a year ago. the young Mahsa Amini after being arrested by the so-called morality police for not wearing the Islamic veil properly, a death that the authorities attributed to natural causes.
His death sparked strong protests in which for months the end of the Islamic Republic was called for. The protests ended after a repression that caused 500 dead, the arrest of at least 22,000 people and the execution of seven protestersone of them in public.
The first anniversary of Amini’s death was commemorated on September 16 amid strong repression and a huge deployment of security forces, and only timid protests took place.
In recent months the Iranian Government has trying to reimpose the use of the veilwith the presence of patrols in the streets, the denial of services and the approval of a law that toughens punishments for not covering one’s hair.
