Mahsa Amini
On 16 September 2022, the 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina Amini, died in a hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances. The Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police of Iran's government, had arrested Amini for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards.
Amini had come to Tehran to visit her brother and on 13 September 2022 was arrested by the Guidance Patrol at the entry of the Shahid Haghani Expressway in Tehran while in the company of her family. She was then transferred to the custody of Moral Security. Her brother, who was with her when she was arrested, was told she would be taken to the detention center to undergo a "briefing class" and released an hour later. Her brother was later informed his sister had a heart attack and a brain seizure at the police station to which she had been taken. Two hours after her arrest, she was taken to Kasra Hospital.
According to Amini's cousin, she was tortured and insulted in the van, as witnessed by her co-detainees. After she arrived at the police station, she began to lose vision and fainted. It took 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive, and an hour and a half for her to get to Kasra hospital.
For two days, Amini was in a coma in Kasra Hospital in Tehran. On 16 September, journalist Niloofar Hamedi (later arrested) broke the story of her coma, posting to Twitter a photo of Amini's father and grandmother crying and embracing in the hospital hallway. Amini died in the intensive care unit later that day.
The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran stated that she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. However, eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with Amini, reported that she was severely beaten and that she died as a result of police brutality, which was denied by the Iranian authorities. The assertions of police brutality, in addition to leaked medical scans, led some observers to believe Amini had a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke due to head injuries received after her arrest.
Amini's death resulted in a series of protests described by CNN as more widespread than the protests in 2009, 2017, and 2019 and by The New York Times as the largest Iranian protests since at least 2009. Some female demonstrators removed their hijab or publicly cut their hair as acts of protest. Iran Human Rights reported that by the beginning of November 2022 at least 304 people had been killed by security forces attacking protests across the country. Amnesty International reported that Iranian security forces had, in some cases, fired into groups with live ammunition and had in other cases killed protesters by beating them with batons.
Citation; Wikipedia 2022
May her death have a purpose in bringing people together, mobilising nations and driving change to bring peace, equality, justice and democracy back to this ancient and beautiful land.