Iran on Friday said an investigation into the death in custody of Mahsa Amini found she lost her life to illness rather than reported beatings that sparked three weeks of bloody protests.
Amini, 22, died on Sept. 16, three days after falling into a coma following her arrest in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly breaching the Islamic republic’s strict dress code for women.
Anger over her death has triggered the biggest wave of protests to rock Iran in almost three years and a crackdown that has killed dozens of protesters and seen scores arrested.
Photo: Reuters
Despite security personnel using lethal force, the women-led protests have continued for 21 consecutive nights, online videos verified by Agence France-Presse showed.
The Iranian Legal Medicine Organization on Friday said that “Mahsa Amini’s death was not caused by blows to the head and vital organs and limbs of the body.”
The death of Amini, whose Kurdish first name is Jhina, was related to “surgery for a brain tumor at the age of eight” it said in a statement.
Amini’s parents have filed a complaint against the officers involved, and one of her cousins living in Iraq said that she died of “a violent blow to the head.”
Other young women and girls have been killed at the protests, but rights group Amnesty International says Iran has been forcing televised confessions out of their families to “absolve themselves of responsibility for their deaths.”
The mother of 16-year-old Nika Shahkarami, who died after going missing on Sept. 20, said on Thursday that she was killed by the state after joining an anti-hijab protest in Tehran.
Nasrin Shahkarami also said the authorities threatened her to make a forced confession over her daughter’s death.
“I saw my daughter’s body myself... The back of her head showed she had suffered a very severe blow as her skull had caved in. That’s how she was killed,” she said in a video posted online by Radio Farda, a US-funded Persian station based in Prague.
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