Iran Witnesses Growing Protests Over Hijab-Death Wearer’s Scandal
According to state media on Wednesday, protests over the young woman Mahsa Amini’s passing following her imprisonment by the nation’s morality police spread to 15 towns across Iran overnight.
Police dispersed crowds of up to 1,000 people on the sixth night of street protests by using tear gas and making arrests, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Demonstrators blocked streets, attacked security personnel with rocks, torched police cars and trash cans, and yelled anti-government chants, it said.
Since officials reported on Friday that 22-year-old Amini had died as a result of her detention by the morality police, who are in charge of enforcing a stringent clothing code for women, there has been a surge in public outrage.
After being jailed for donning a hijab headscarf in a “improper” manner, official media reported that Amini had slipped into a coma.
Many Iranian women have protested by removing their headscarves during the demonstrations.
According to IRNA, rallies took place overnight in Tehran, the country’s capital, as well as other significant cities like Mashhad in the northeast, Tabriz in the northwest, Rasht in the north, Isfahan in the middle, and Shiraz in the south.
The governor of Amini’s native region of Kurdistan, where the demonstrations first took place, Ismail Zarei Koosha, announced on Tuesday that three people had died as a result of the demonstrations there, but he did not say when.
The United Nations, the United States, France, and other nations have all condemned Mahsa Amini’s death and Iran’s response to the protests.
Late on Tuesday, Nasser Kanani, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, denounced what he called “foreign interventionist stances.”
“It is regrettable that some countries try to take advantage of an incident under investigation as an opportunity to pursue their political goals and desires against the government and people of Iran,” Nasser stated.
AFP
