Along With Iranian Female in Coma, Uncertainty Drops on Authorities

The 16-year-old female, her quick dark hair revealed, got into a train cars and truck in Tehran very early Sunday on her means to institution, surveillance cam video show through Iran’s condition tv revealed. Mins eventually, she was actually dragged on cold and also applied the learn system.

All full week, the female, Armita Geravand, has actually remained in a coma, protected through surveillance brokers in the critical care unit of an army medical center in Tehran and also stiring up wide contrasts along with Mahsa Amini, that passed away in 2014 at 22 in the custodianship of the righteousness cops after being actually charged of going against Iran’s hijab guidelines, which need girls to cover their hair.

Exactly what took place to Armita on Sunday is actually unclear, and also the federal government has actually certainly not launched video coming from inside the learn that would certainly expose what created the teen crash.

But the news of another young woman in a coma under murky circumstances — another girl, another metro station, another hospital, another grief-stricken family — was enough to stir outrage in Iran and fuel accusations that the government’s hijab agents must have harmed her.

Ms. Amini’s death last year set off a nationwide uprising, led by women and girls, demanding an end to Iran’s clerical theocracy. The “Mahsa movement,” as it was called, morphed into the most serious challenge to the legitimacy of the ruling clerics since they took power in 1979. In crushing the protests, the government killed more than 500 people, including teenagers and children, and arrested tens of thousands of demonstrators.

Farzad Seifikaran, a journalist with Radio Zamandeh who first reported the story about Armita on Sunday, interviewed two of her relatives, a friend and another person familiar with the episode. The sources told him that Armita and two of her friends, who were also not covering their hair, argued with officers enforcing hijab rules, Mr. Seifikaran said, and that one of them pushed Armita.

She fell and hit her head on a metal object on the train and suffered cerebral hemorrhaging, Mr. Seifikaran said the sources told him.

The government says she fainted because of a drop in blood sugar after skipping breakfast. Masoud Dorosti, head of the Tehran Metro Operating Company, told the Iranian news media that footage from its cameras showed no sign of a verbal or physical confrontation between passengers and municipality employees.

The state news agency, IRNA, published a video of Armita’s parents looking shellshocked and repeating the government narrative. “My daughter, I think her blood pressure, I don’t know what, I think, they say that her blood pressure dropped then she fell down and her head hit the edge of the metro,” said her mother, Shahin Ahmadi, stumbling on her words as her voice shook.

Her father, Ahmad Geravand, looked down, arms folded, as she spoke. Mr. Geravand said Armita had been healthy and did not use any medications, and he asked for prayers for her.

Armita lives in a working-class neighborhood of western Tehran and is an art student at a vocational art and design high school, her classmate and relatives told Mr. Seifikaran. She has a passion for painting and pursued taekwondo training semiprofessionally, they said.

The government’s lack of openness and the tight security at the air force hospital have contributed to the suspicions that the authorities had a hand in harming Armita. Anger has spilled out this week on social media, with people denouncing what they see as the government’s brutality.

“Transparency means all the security agents leave Fajr Air Force Hospital and surrounding areas and journalists be allowed to report on what happened to the 16-year-old girl,” wrote Mohsen Borhani, a lawyer in Tehran, on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter.

The authorities eventually stifled street protests over Ms. Amini’s death, and they were assertive in squelching commemorations of its anniversary last month. However many women and girls across Iran have continued to defy the mandatory hijab rule by letting their hair show in public. This collective act of civil disobedience has been risky, as the government has come up with new ways to catch and punish such women, including the use of facial recognition software.

A group of Iranian teachers’ unions said in a statement on Wednesday that the Education Ministry’s security director had visited Armita’s high school and warned teachers and staff that they would be fired if they spoke about her, and that her classmates were threatened to keep them silent.

Security agents have swarmed the hospital, locked down the ward where Armita is kept and threatened to arrest family members and her classmates if they spoke to the updates media, according to rights groups and activists. Maryam Lotfi, a journalist for the daily newspaper Shargh who went to the hospital on Sunday, was arrested as she was interviewing Armita’s mother and detained for 24 hours, according to her colleagues and editors.

“We can confirm that Armita’s family is under immense pressure to adhere to the state’s narrative, while she lies unconscious and guarded by state security personnel in a military hospital with all visitors banned,” said Jasmin Ramsey, deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent advocacy group based in New York. “If her case were as straightforward as they claim, why all the restrictions and secrecy?”

Many parents and students were already fearful because of an additional unexplained trauma: Hundreds of schoolgirls in dozens of cities were hospitalized early this year with respiratory and neurological symptoms that the authorities said were partly caused by deliberate attacks with toxic chemicals.

“As a mother, I am feeling very stressed these days,” said Fariba, 46, whose daughter is a student in Karaj, near Tehran, and who asked that her last name not be published out of fear of retribution. “I cannot let my daughter leave the house alone; I am afraid that something bad would happen to her. She does not want to wear a hijab. So many of our girls these days have become extremely brave.”

The plight of Iran’s women and their courage in pushing for their rights have reverberated widely, both within the country and abroad. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, was among those reacting to the news about Armita, posting Wednesday on X, “Once again a girl in Iran is fighting for her life.”

“Shocked and also concerned about reports that Iran’s so-called morality police possess assaulted 16-year-old Armita Geravand,” Abram Paley, the U.S. deputy special envoy on Iran, wrote on X. “We continue to stand with the brave people of Iran and also work along with the world to hold the regime accountable for its abuses.”

Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting coming from Capital.