With Iranian Girl in Coma, Suspicion Falls on Government

With Iranian Girl in Coma, Suspicion Falls on Government

NY Times-Oct 5th2023

The 16-year-old girl, her short black hair uncovered, entered a subway car in Tehran early Sunday on her way to school, security camera footage broadcast by Iran’s state television showed. Minutes later, she was dragged out unconscious and laid on the train platform.

All week, the girl, Armita Geravand, has been in a coma, guarded by security agents in the intensive care unit of a military hospital in Tehran and evoking broad comparisons with Mahsa Amini, who died last year at 22 in the custody of the morality police after being accused of violating Iran’s hijab rules, which require women to cover their hair.

Exactly what happened to Armita on Sunday is not clear, and the government has not released footage from inside the train that would reveal what made the teenager collapse.

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 four people familiar with the episode. Those interviewed 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.