The young Armita Garavand died this Saturday after spending 28 days in a coma after an alleged altercation with the authorities for not wearing the Islamic veil in the Tehran subway, the state agency IRNA reported.
The Iranian authorities have claimed that the 16-year-old girl hit her head after suffering a power drop in the capital’s subway, but human rights groups have reported that she was attacked for not covering herself with the mandatory Islamic veil.
“Unfortunately, the brain damage caused him to go into a coma and he died a few minutes ago,” IRNA said. The state agency stated that the young woman received “extensive medical treatment during her 28 days of hospitalization in a special care unit.”
Once again he repeated the official version that Garavand suffered a drop in blood pressure on October 1 when he was entering a subway car, fell to the ground and hit his head, which caused cardiac arrest, decreased cerebral oxygenation and an edema in the brain.
Security images released by IRNA show how Garavand and two friends enter one of the capital’s metro cars and then two of them leave carrying the third, a video that the authorities have used to demonstrate that no attack occurred.
Amnesty International, however, stated that the video has been manipulated with frame acceleration in four sections and there are gaps of more than three minutes in the recording made public. The Kurdish human rights organization Hengaw, based in Oslo, has reported that the young woman was attacked for not wearing the Islamic veil, mandatory in the country since 1983.
The case is similar to that of the young Mahsa Amini, who died a little over a year ago after being detained by the so-called morality police for not wearing the Islamic veil properly, a death that the authorities attributed to natural causes.
His death sparked strong protests that for months called for the end of the Islamic Republic and only disappeared after a repression that caused 500 deaths, the arrest of at least 22,000 people and in which seven protesters were executed, one of them in public.
The first anniversary of Amini’s death was commemorated on September 16 amid strong repression and a huge deployment of security forces, and only timid protests took place.
In recent months, the Iranian Government has been trying to reimpose the use of the veil, with the presence of patrols in the streets, the denial of services and the approval of a law that toughens punishments for not covering one’s hair.
