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.”
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS