Rabat – Protests are continuing throughout Iran against the country’s morality police and its harsh regulations on the public appearance of women, after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini fell into a coma and died after allegedly being beaten by the morality police.
The police called Amini’s death an “unfortunate incident,” and denied the accusations that they mistreated her while she was detained.
They said she fell ill while waiting with other women that were being detained by the morality police, who have enforced the strict rules imposed in Iran to compel women to cover their hair and wear loose fitting clothes in public.
The Persian hashtag #MahsaAmini has reached nearly 2 million mentions on Twitter, and protests have persisted across many of Iran’s regions. The biggest protests were in Iranian Kurdistan, where protestors were seen throwing rocks at security forces.
For the protestors, the police’s remarks were inconsistent with the woman’s family’s, as her father told Iranian media that she suffered no health issues and suffered bruises at the hands of police.
Frustration with Iran’s strict regulation of women’s bodies had been building before Amini’s tragic death.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi recently called for the Hijab laws to be strengthened, notably through the use of facial recognition technology to enforce the rules. Reports of the country’s planned adoption of surveillance technology to optimize the implementation of its oppressive Hijab laws generated public outrage.
Amini’s body has been transferred to her hometown of Saqqez to be buried there, and videos shared online have shown a huge crowd gathered at the cemetery on Sunday chanting “Death to Dictator.”
