A 16-year-old Iranian girl, Armita Garawand, is in a coma and has been hospitalized under close monitoring in Tehran since Sunday after an attack in the capital’s Shohada subway, probably because she did not wear the mandatory headscarf wore. According to the Kurdish human rights organization Hengaw, the teenager was beaten by moral police. As in the case of Mahsa Amini, Iranian authorities have denied this, saying the young woman “fainted” and hit her head due to low blood pressure. Footage of the accident shows Armita being taken off the train by other attendants and placed on the platform, where she remains motionless and unconscious.
However, the video does not show what happened in the cabin and it is not clear what type of headgear the girl was wearing. Although Garawand is based in Tehran, he comes from the city of Kermanshah in Kurdish-populated western Iran. The government’s official news agency, Fars, published an interview with the parents. The father said: “It has been proven to us that it was just an accident.” In order to silence everything, the regime has already published forced interviews with family members of the victim in the past. Now Garawand is in Fajr Hospital in Tehran and “currently no visits to the victim are allowed, not even by her family.” Shargh newspaper journalist Maryam Lotfi attempted to enter the hospital after the tragic incident but was immediately arrested but later released.
Just over a year after the death of Mahsa, who was arrested for not wearing the veil properly, authorities remain on alert fearing a worsening of tensions. In fact, the recent misfortune drew a parallel to his death. Even in this case, authorities had reported that the Kurdish girl had a neurological disorder that caused her to collapse in a police station. His family never accepted this explanation and claimed that they were denied the right to choose the doctor who would perform the autopsy.
Since then, the regime has tried to enforce compulsory hijab for women, but in some cities many Iranians no longer wear headscarves.
After Amini’s death, censorship tightened and two of the journalists who reported on the 22-year-old Kurdish man’s fate remain in prison, accused of collusion with outside powers. Some reformist newspapers were closed. Mahsa’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, is accused of propaganda against the regime, including for denying the official forensic reports on the young woman’s death and for speaking to local and foreign media about Iran.