According to the NGO ‘Hengaw’ Iranian security forces arrested Shahin Ahmadi, the mother of Armita Geravand, the young woman who has been hospitalized since Sunday in a coma at Tehran’s Fajr hospital due to head trauma. The complaint is that the 16-year-old was hit during a clash over her veil with the morality police in a subway station in the Iranian capital.
In the past few hours, a photo was published while the 16-year-old is intubated: you can see that she has a head wound covered by a large plaster, her eyes closed, the drip on her abandoned left arm. The snapshot, taken in the intensive care unit, was released by the Kurdish human rights group Hengaw Organization for Human Rights and it bounced on sites and social networks with the speed of the internet: a possible fuse for a new wave of protests like those that shook Iran after the death of Mahsa Aminiarrested because she did not wear the hijab according to the standards of the ayatollahs and mysteriously died after three days in a coma.
It was the association itself that reported “serious physical assault” suffered by Armita after a video circulated on social media showed a girl being carried out of a carriage by some women in black chadors and placed on the ground, motionless. Version denied, as in the case of Mahsa, at an official level. The state media – which according to the NGO published the edited video – claimed that the young woman instead fainted after a drop in blood pressure that caused her to hit the wall of the train carriage. And the official Fars news agency published an interview with the girl’s parents in which they said she was not attacked. “We checked all the videos and it proved to us that it was an accident,” the father said.
A technique tested by the guardians of Orthodoxy which, however, in recent months has not prevented either the circulation of news or the revolts that have shaken the regime. So this time, to be more convincing, the security agents – Hengaw reports – seized the mobile phones of the young woman’s relatives. Not only. The journalist Samira Rahi, Iranwire claims, shared a photo showing the deployment of police forces outside the hospital. “Two police cars are positioned at the entrance to the emergency room of Fajr hospital and the presence of plainclothes officers is evident,” he wrote on Twitter, citing an informed source. The journalist also reported that “security forces inspected vehicles passing through the area and, in some cases, carefully examined the contents of passengers’ cell phones.” Plainclothes officers were also present in the intensive care unit where Armita has been hospitalized since Sunday evening.
Another journalist, Maryam Lotfi, who works for the Shargh newspaper, was arrested after managing to enter the hospital where Armita is located. They were over 90 journalists targeted by Iranian authorities during the demonstrations triggered by Mahsa’s death. The best known, Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, who followed Mahsa’s case, are still in prison on charges of conspiracy against national security.