Teenage girl dies after Iran’s security forces ‘beat her in the head with batons’
Another teenage girl has died during the anti-government protests that have torn through Iran, Amnesty International has reported.
Sarina Esmailzadeh, 16, known for her upbeat YouTube vlogs, died in the hands of security forces on September 21.
She died on the way to the hospital in Karaj, the regional capital of Alborz province, The Guardian reported.
Amnesty International said a primary course claimed Esmailzadeh’s family had been subjected to ‘intense harassment to coerce them into silence’.
Esmailzadeh often used social media to spotlight many of the issues women across Iran have taken to the streets in their thousands in recent weeks.
She also spent her days listening and dancing to music as well as singing covers of her favourite tracks, such as Hozier’s Take Me to Church.
Chief of the Alborz Province Justice Department, Hossein Fazeli, claimed a preliminary investigation has suggested Esmailzadeh died by suicide after jumping from a roof, Iranian media reported.
But activists deny this, saying officials are covering up Esmailzadeh’s death.
Officials have claimed Nika Shakarami, 16, also died by suicide by falling from a building – a claim people close to her family deny, according to the BBC.
Anti-regime critics suspect that remarks from Shakarami’s family broadcast on state television were forced by the authorities.
Amnesty International verified Esmailzadeh’s cause of death, saying that her beating is the latest in a pattern of violence used by Iranian security forces.
The charity has documented ‘widespread patterns of torture and other ill-treatment’ that includes the use of live ammunition by security personnel against not only protesters but bystanders too.
Sexual assault and other forms of sexist violence have been recorded, with cases of officers grabbing women’s breasts or pulling their hair after they removed their headscarves.
According to documents leaked to Amnesty International, Iranian security forces were ordered to ‘severely confront troublemakers and anti-revolutionaries’.
Casting off their hijabs in defiance of the so-called moral law that demands women wear them in public, women have taken to the streets in an explosion of rage ignited by the death of Masha Amini.
Amini, 22, died in the custody of the country’s morality police days after being arrested for failing to cover her hair modestly enough.
Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general said: ‘The Iranian authorities knowingly decided to harm or kill people who took to the streets to express their anger at decades of repression and injustice.
‘Amid an epidemic of systemic impunity that has long prevailed in Iran, dozens of men, women and children have been unlawfully killed in the latest round of bloodshed.’
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