Teenager Armita Garawand dies after defying Iran’s headscarf law

Her story mirrored the case of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman whose death in the custody of morality police after three days in a coma last September sparked months of anti-government protests that grew into the greatest demonstration of opposition to the Iranian regime in years.

Several hundred protesters have been killed by security forces and thousands arrested since. At least seven have been executed since Amini’s death. For the offence of “waging war against God” dozens of other young women are reported to have lost their lives in suspicious circumstances. Some were killed in public by security forces. In other cases, details are still sparse, the bodies withheld from families, the killings covered up.

Armita Garawand was in a coma for a month before her death in hospital. The Iranian regime has refused permission for her to be buried in her home town

Opposition activists consulted by The Sunday Times expected Garawand’s death to provoke a new surge of anger and protest: sources in Tehran reported that police had set up a cordon around the hospital on Friday night before the death was announced in an effort to discourage any mass protest.

“Once again, the religious fascism ruling Iran has taken an innocent girl from us under the bogus excuse of improper veiling,” said Maryam Rajavi, leader of an exiled opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. “The people, especially the youth of Iran, as well as my fellow Iranian girls and women, remain determined to overthrow the mullahs’ regime and replace it with democracy and people’s sovereignty.”

Garawand, an ethnic Kurd, was on her way to school with friends at 7am on Sunday, October 1 when she fell unconscious on the metro. Iran’s state news agency said that she had “hit the back of her head against the edge of the platform” when she collapsed at Shohada station in Tehran.

This was an unlikely story: her friends said that they had been challenged by a “hijab patrol” and that Garawand had been assaulted for not wearing a headscarf. Women are legally required to cover their hair and wear long, loose-fitting clothes in Iran, where the secular and western-backed Shah was deposed in a revolution in 1979.

But since the eruption of last year’s mass protests, women have been increasingly flouting the dress code. This is particularly brave: in September, a year after Amini’s death, Tehran’s lawmakers voted in favour of increasing already tough penalties that include jail sentences of up to ten years.

The morality police, who for a while had disappeared from the streets, returned in their ubiquitous green and white vans. A new “Hijab and Chastity” campaign was launched by the regime, using thousands of CCTV cameras and facial recognition technology to identify those walking or driving without the “correct” attire.

Garawand was taken to Fajr Hospital in Tehran. The regime put pressure on the family to say that she had suffered from a mystery illness that had led to her collapse and injury, fearful that she could become another catalyst or rallying cry for protest against the regime.

CCTV video from the metro station showed her being pulled, clearly unconscious, by her friends from the carriage on to the platform. It was not until two days later, however, that the incident was reported online by a human rights group which claimed she had become the latest victim in the battle over the dress code. Rights groups later claimed she had been assaulted by female police.

The regime denied any “physical or verbal altercations” had taken place between her and other passengers and stuck to its story on Saturday: a government-affiliated news agency quoted doctors as saying that Garawand had “suffered a fall resulting in brain damage followed by convulsions, a decline in brain oxygen and a cerebral oedema after a sudden drop in blood pressure”.

Surveillance video aired by Iranian state television showed women pulling Garawand from a metro train train

AP/IRANIAN STATE TELEVISION

Ahmad Vahidi, the interior minister, said last month that the authorities had investigated the incident and that the “situation was completely clear”. He added: “The enemies do not want the country to be calm and they always try to make every incident a controversy.”

Garawand is one of many young women who have fallen victim to the heavy-handed tactics of security forces.

On September 21, 23-year-old Hadis Najafi joined a protest in Karaj in northern Iran, announcing in a video beforehand: “In the end, I’ll be happy … when everything is changing.” A few hours later she was shot dead. Her family was not allowed to collect her body.

Negin Abdolmaleki, a 21-year-old biomedical engineering student, collapsed and died in her university dormitory after returning from protests where she had reportedly been hit several times in the head by security forces. A witness at Hamadan University of Technology told Hengaw, a Kurdish rights group: “The security forces, along with a number of intelligence forces, immediately stormed the dormitory. They ordered students who were aware of the incident — and Negin’s family — to say that she died from ‘eating expired canned fish’.” Later, the prosecutor’s office in Hamadan province offered a new explanation: that she had been killed by alcohol poisoning.

As for Garawand, authorities were said to have refused to hand her body back to her family, who had wanted to bury her in their home town of Kermanshah, in the west of Iran.

The government is said to fear that her corpse’s progression across the country could have become a focus of rage against the regime. It has ordered a quiet burial in Tehran.