Loading player
The trial of Niloofar Hamedi, the journalist who first covered the case of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who died in prison after being arrested for not wearing correctly the Islamic veil. Amini’s death had provoked widespread, exceptional and transversal protests against the Iranian regime, which had responded with a harsh and violent repression, with thousands of arrests, hundreds of deaths in clashes and subsequent death sentences, some of which were carried out in public.
The beginning of the trial against Hamedi was announced on Twitter by her husband Mohammad Hossein Ajorlou. Hamedi, who is 30, works for the progressive newspaper Shargh: she is accused of a series of crimes, including that of «collusion with hostile powers», precisely for her cover up of Amini’s death. The journalist is also on trial with her Elaheh Mohammadiagain for the story of the Amini case.
Both Hamedi and Mohammadi were arrested eight months ago, have been in prison ever since and the charges against them can lead Also to a death sentence. The trial against Hamedi is taking place behind closed doors: her husband said Tuesday’s hearing lasted less than two hours, that “her lawyers did not have the opportunity to defend her” and that she was not allowed access to the not even his family members.
Mahsa Amini had been arrested on 13 September 2022 by the Iranian police. Three days later she was transferred to a hospital in Tehran because, according to the police, she had a heart attack in prison, a version immediately denied by her parents Amini. According to them, her daughter was severely beaten in prison, and her beatings were the cause of her hospitalization on 16 September as well as her death on the same day.
Just that day, when rumors began to circulate of a girl in a coma after being beaten in prison, Hamedi had managed to enter the hospital where Amini was being treated, and to photograph her parents embracing each other outside the ward where the Daughter. Hamedi published that photo on Twitter shortly after Amini was declared dead: she was the first journalist to document the incident and from that moment the news began to spread very quickly on social networks: the protests began the same day.
Niloofar Hamedi’s photo of Mahsa Amini’s parents hugging in the hospital was one of her last posts online before she was arrested days later and her Twitter account listed as suspended.#Mahsa_Amini pic.twitter.com/QpkfaDMNs0
— Negar Mortazavi (@NegarMortazavi) October 12, 2022
After the photo was published, Hamedi’s Twitter account came suspended (it is not known whether at the request of the Iranian authorities and for which possible infringement of the rules of the social network: no explanations were given in this regard) and she was arrested on the following 22 September. In the following days, her husband said that his wife had been taken to Evin prison, in northern Tehran, and placed in solitary confinement.