Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi expressed her condolences on Instagram over the death of Armita Geravand.
“Armita Geravand, who was full of enthusiasm for life, was led to death because of her beautiful hair, and she had no intention of covering her hair with the ‘hijab obligation’,” said Narges Mohammadi in her post.
Geravand, 17, died after allegedly encountering police while breaking the hijab law. The official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday (28/10), that he entered a subway car at Meydan-E Shohada or Martyrs’ Square, a Metro station in southern Tehran on October 1.
Mohammadi, in an Instagram post, criticized the secrecy surrounding Geravand’s death. No independent reporters were allowed into the hospital, only those affiliated with state media, he wrote. The state news agency announced the teenager’s death, not his parents, Mohammadi wrote.
The Nobel laureate has been detained and imprisoned several times in the past 20 years for her human rights activism in Iran and is currently imprisoned because of the messages she conveyed.
In a post on the X platform on Saturday, Abram Paley, the United States’ deputy special envoy to Iran, expressed his condolences over the teenager’s death.
The Norway-based human rights organization Hengaw, citing information from members of Geravand’s family, said early Saturday that authorities prohibited the family from transporting his body for burial in his hometown of Kermanshah, a city in Iran’s western region where the majority of the population is Kurdish.
Like many major cities in Iran, Kermanshah was hit by a surge in anti-government protests this year in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in September 2022 while in the custody of morality police.
Geravand’s death comes nearly a year after Amini’s death sparked months of anti-government protests over the country’s mandatory Islamic dress code. The protests grew into the largest opposition demonstrations in years, with demonstrators mobilizing against the Iranian government.
Source : VOA
