Iranian women march after weekly Friday prayers in Tehran during a protest asking the government to intensify its crackdown on women and men to enforce the Islamic dress code. (Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)
OAN Staff Brooke Mallory 6:07 PM – Thursday, August 15, 2024
Iranian police opened fire on a 31-year-old woman on a road next to the Caspian Sea. The woman attempted to accelerate away in her car, perhaps already knowing that the police wanted to seize her vehicle.
Advertisement
Iranian activists say that because she had previously broken Iran’s headscarf law by exposing her hair in public while driving, police had been ordered to confiscate her car.
A “Hijab or a veil or headscarf is a piece of clothing worn by Muslim women to cover themselves from head to feet. It also serves as protection for women from the male gaze,” according to bangsamoro.gov.
Arezou Badri, a mother of two, is now bedridden in a police hospital and unable to move, becoming the latest victim of Iran’s ongoing campaign of cracking down on headscarves, known as hijabs. Many incoming reports are now claiming that she is paralyzed from the neck down.
The most recent shooting comes after news headlines reported that a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini had died in police detention for not wearing a hijab nearly two years ago. Mahsa’s death sparked widespread protests in support of women’s rights and against the theocracy in the nation.
“They have elevated it to the most serious crime, where the police is allowed basically to shoot to kill,” said Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran. “That’s really a war on women.”
According to activists, Badri was shot on July 22nd at approximately 11 p.m. while driving home from a friend’s house with her sister along a coastal route in Iran’s northern Mazandaran region. Police Colonel Ahmad Amini was quoted in a brief report by Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency claiming that patrol officers had asked a car with tinted windows to stop, but it refused. The impound notice and the hijab infraction were not mentioned. However, Iranian activists maintain that the police are lying about the circumstances surrounding the recent shooting in their statement.
“Officers fired into the vehicle, the group said; the gunfire pierced her [Arezou Badri’s] lung and damaged her spine,” according to Yahoo News.
It’s not entirely clear why police stopped Badri’s car, but activists living in Iran attributed it to the impound alert related to the hijab infraction. Furthermore, it’s also unclear if any of the police cars on the scene had cameras that captured the incident or if any of the officers had body cameras on.
Iran does not have any publicly available statistics on fatal police shootings. Since some police personnel work in more paramilitary capacities in places like Iran’s unrest-plagued Sistan and Baluchestan provinces, there is a considerable variation in weaponry training and tactics.
Activists also claim that authorities are preventing Badri’s family from taking photographs of her, limiting their visits, and keeping her under severe guard in a police hospital in Tehran. In spite of this, the BBC this week released a picture of Badri that highlights her situation.
“She has no sensation from the waist down, and doctors have said that it will be clear in the coming months whether she is completely paralyzed,” said one activist in Iran, who requested anonymity.
Despite the fact that police and official media hardly ever cover it, the crackdown on the hijab is a hot topic in Iran. In Tehran, the majority of women still walk around with their heads covered or lightly wrapped around their shoulders. According to Ghaemi, it’s believed that surveillance cameras monitor women who drive without wearing hijabs by comparing their faces to a database of photos kept up to date by the government, also known as facial recognition.
Women and police officers even get into physical altercations occasionally due to the hijab-related laws.
Iranian news outlet Ensaf also released surveillance footage last week that showed a 14-year-old girl being physically assaulted by the morality police in Tehran. The 14-year-old’s mother claimed that one officer had pulled her hair, while another put their foot on her neck, and lastly, that her daughter’s head was slammed into an electrical box.
“I saw my daughter with a wounded face, swollen lips, a bruised neck, torn clothes, and she couldn’t even speak,” Maryam Abbasi, her mother, told the outlet. “Her eyes were so swollen from crying that they wouldn’t open.”
This is how women are treated in Iran. This man is so angry because the woman in the car refused to wear hijab. (The video)
Another woman #ArezouBadri was shot by police, and still is in hospital with severe injuries and might not be able to walk again (the latest photo… pic.twitter.com/FYNX90Q3rm
