Mahsa Amini died on Friday after being arrested by the morality police for not wearing her hijab and trousers properly, a tragic incident that has sparked street anger against the callous and sometimes violent treatment meted out to women by this police department . . Local petitions have been launched to disband the morality police, saying their actions enforcing the hijab are counterproductive and discriminatory. Mohsen Mansouri, the governor of Tehran, tweeted: “The main elements of the original core of the rallies in Tehran tonight were fully organized, trained and designed to create unrest in Tehran. “Burning the flag, throwing diesel on the streets, throwing stones, attacking the police, burning the motorbike and garbage cans, destroying public property, etc… is not the business of ordinary people.” The police arrived to disperse the protesters. Photo: Wana News Agency/Reuters Some Iranian lawmakers claimed that outsiders, including news organizations backed by Iran’s regional foes in Saudi Arabia, were exploiting her death. However, they continued to promise an investigation. The magnitude of the violence and the number of arrests on Monday night are difficult to estimate independently. However, videos of beatings and protests were posted on social media, including footage with the sound of gunshots. The Kurdish human rights group Hengaw, which is based in Norway, said it had confirmed three deaths in rallies in Kurdistan province – one each in the towns of Divandareh, Saqqez and Dehglan. He added that 221 people were injured and another 250 arrested in the Kurdistan region, where a general strike also took place on Monday. A 10-year-old girl – whose blood-soaked images have gone viral on social media – was injured in the town of Buchan but was alive, he added. Many protests were peaceful, including placing a banner depicting Amini on a bridge on one of Tehran’s main highways. The dispute is sensitive for the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, who is currently in New York to address the UN general assembly for the first time. Human rights groups in New York are protesting his presence and taking legal action against him. Although Raisi has ordered an investigation and expressed personal sympathy, his critics say his past support for a more intrusive morality police has exposed a cultural divide within Iran. In a sign that authorities were worried the furor could get out of hand, an aide to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, paid a two-hour visit to Amini’s family home on Monday. The semi-official Tasnim news agency said Abdolreza Pourzahabi told Amini’s family “all institutions will take action to defend the rights that were violated” and that he was sure Khamenei was “affected and hurt too” by her death. Protesters gather around a burning barricade. Photo: AFP/Getty Images The row has overshadowed talks on Tuesday between Ali Bagheri, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, and the EU’s chief negotiator, Enrique Mora. The regime is determined to argue that he died in police custody not as a result of a beating, but as a result of a pre-existing brain condition and an operation carried out when he was five. CT scans of her brain released by the hospital have been the subject of medical controversy, with government advocates citing neurologists as saying they show psychological stress caused by previous brain surgery and critics claiming they show signs of physical beating and trauma. The official government news website said the investigation could take three weeks to conclude. Regardless of the outcome, sections of Iranian society have clearly lost patience with the morality police, claiming that many women suffered from long-term post-traumatic stress disorder after police efforts to “re-educate” them. In Geneva, the UN’s human rights office said Iran’s morality police had been expanding their patrols in recent months, targeting women for improperly wearing the Islamic headscarf, known as the hijab. He said verified videos showed women being slapped in the face, beaten with batons and thrown into police vans for wearing the hijab too loosely. Nada Al-Nashif, the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said: “The tragic death of Mahsa Amini and the allegations of torture and ill-treatment must be promptly, impartially and effectively investigated by an independent competent authority.”
