French authorities were on Tuesday investigating as suicide the drowning of an Iranian man in the southeastern city of Lyon who had said on social media that he was going to kill himself to draw attention to the protest crackdown in Iran.
Mohammad Moradi, 38, was late on Monday found in the Rhone River that flows through the center of Lyon, a police source, who asked not to be named, told reporters.
Emergency services intervened, but were unable to resuscitate him on the riverbank, the source added.
Photo: AFP
Moradi had posted a video on Instagram saying that he was about to drown himself to highlight the crackdown on protesters in Iran since the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, after her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of the country’s strict dress code for women.
“When you see this video, I will be dead,” Moradi said.
“The police are attacking people, we have lost a lot of sons and daughters, we have to do something,” Moradi said in the video.
“I decided to commit suicide in the Rhone River. It is a challenge, to show that we, Iranian people, we are very tired of this situation,” he added.
Lyon prosecutors said they had launched a probe to “verify the theory of suicide, in view in particular of the messages posted by the person concerned on social networks announcing his intention” to take his life.
The incident has shocked the city, with a small rally to remember Moradi taking place on the banks of the Rhone on Tuesday.
Mourners placed candles and wreaths on the riverside railings.
“Mohammad Moradi killed himself to make the voice of revolution heard in Iran. Our voice is not carried by Western media,” said Timothee Amini of the local Iranian community.
According to several members of the Iranian community, Moradi was a history undergraduate and worked in a restaurant.
He lived in Lyon with his wife for three years.
“His heart was beating for Iran, he could no longer bear the regime,” Amini said, deploring that while the Ukraine conflict was covered “every morning,” one heard “very little about Iran” in the news.
Lili Mohadjer said Moradi hoped that “his death would be another element for Western media and governments to back the revolution under way in Iran.”
She said his death was “not suicide,” but “sacrifice to gain freedom.”
Mohadjer said that Moradi in the video said he “could not live peacefully, comfortably here — where he was very well integrated” — while Iranians were being killed.
The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR) said that 476 protesters have been killed in the crackdown, with at least 100 Iranians risking execution over the protests, in addition to two young men already executed.
At least 100 Iranians arrested in more than 100 days of nationwide protests face charges punishable by death, IHR said.
Earlier this month, Iran executed two men in connection with the protests, an escalation of the authorities’ crackdown that advocates say is meant to instill public fear.
In a report on Tuesday, IHR identified 100 detainees who face potential capital punishment, including at least 11 already sentenced to death.
Five detainees on the IHR list are women.
The report said many of them have limited access to legal representation.
“By issuing death sentences and executing some of them, they [the authorities] want to make people go home,” IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said.
“It has some effect,” he told reporters, but “what we’ve observed in general is more anger against the authorities. Their strategy of spreading fear through executions has failed.”
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