A 31-year-old woman – who was not wearing the Islamic veil required in Iran – was left paralysed after being shot in the back by security forces, media reported on Sunday.
This is Arezou Badri, a mother of two small children, who was shot on July 22, 2024 while driving in the city of Nourin the northern province of Mazandaran, for not heeding the police order to stop, according to a report by the BBC Persianciting an informed source.
The officers tried to stop her car when they realised that there was an order to confiscate the vehicle for not respecting the strict hijab code. The measure has been applied in the country in recent months to force the wearing of the Islamic veil.
By text message, Authorities warn owners of cars caught with unveiled women that their vehicle will be confiscated. That was the case of Badri, who, when she did not stop, the agents first shot at the car’s tires, then aimed at her and the bullet hit her in the back.
Islamic Republic’s war against women. Arezoo Badri, a young woman was shot in northern Iran for not observing her mandatory hijab. Arezou, 31, has two small children but is now unable to walk! I first shared these photos and her story of ella on July 29 on my Instagram. Still, the family… pic.twitter.com/zYcUKpZUmo
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 11, 2024
After about ten daysmedical teams managed to remove the bullet from Badri’s waist, but his lungs and spinal cord were severely damaged.which means she cannot walk. According to specialists, it is not yet known whether the woman has been left permanently or temporarily paralyzed.
Badri is currently under tight security in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of Tehran’s Valiasr Hospital and officers are only allowing her family to visit her for a few minutes, after taking away their mobile phones, to prevent images of the victim from being released.
Since April 2024, the Iranian authorities have launched a campaign called Light Plan in order to impose the wearing of the Islamic veil on women who had stopped wearing it after the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, in police custody, for not wearing the hijab properly.
Journalists acquitted in Mahsa Amini case
Meanwhile, Iranian journalists Nilufar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi – who revealed the case of Amini’s death – were acquitted by the Court of Appeals of the charge of “cooperation with a hostile foreign government,” in reference to the United States.
“After appealing the original sentence, according to the verdict of the Tehran Provincial Court of Appeals, Nilufar Hamedi was acquitted of the charge of collaborating with a hostile foreign government,” the reporter’s lawyers, Parto Borhanpour and Hojat Kermani, told the reformist newspaper on Sunday. Shargh.
Likewise, Saeed Parsaei, Mohammadi’s husband, also announced on the social network X (formerly Twitter) that his partner has been acquitted of the charge.
Hamedi, from the newspaper Sharghand Mohammadi, from the newspaper Hammihanhad been sentenced in the first instance to seven and six years in prison, respectively, in the same case in October 2023. Both now face charges of “collusion against national security” and “dissemination of propaganda against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, for which they have been sentenced to six years in prison each.
However, Hamedi’s lawyers said the journalists would be acquitted of the remaining cases under an amnesty announced in 2023 by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that, according to the courts, did not include them.
The journalists were arrested in September 2022 after Hamedi published a photo of Amini in the hospital, when she was in a coma and intubated, and that Mohammadi covered the young woman’s burial in the city of Saqez, in Kurdistan, where the protests of the movement began woman, life, freedomAfter spending 17 months in temporary detention, they were released on bail in January 2024.
The protests sparked by Amini’s death, after she was arrested for not wearing her Islamic veil properly, took place across the country with demands for greater freedoms and the end of the Islamic Republic. However, they were put down months later with a brutal crackdown that caused the deaths of some 500 people and the execution of ten protesters to date.
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