Iran police shot a woman while trying to seize her car over hijab law violation, activists say
On a darkened road beside the Caspian Sea, Iranian police officers opened fire last month on a 31-year-old woman who had tried to speed away likely knowing they wanted to seize her vehicle.
On a darkened road beside the Caspian Sea, Iranian police officers opened fire last month on a 31-year-old woman who had tried to speed away likely knowing they wanted to seize her vehicle.
Police had been ordered to impound her car, activists say, because of an earlier violation of Iran’s headscarf law for showing her hair in public while driving.
Now unable to walk and confined to a bed at a police hospital, Arezou Badri — a mother of two — is the latest casualty of Iran’s renewed crackdown over headscarves, or hijabs. Her shooting occurred nearly two years after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died while in police custody over an alleged headscarf violation, sparking nationwide protests over women’s rights and against the country’s theocracy.
As the Sept. 16 anniversary of Amini’s death approaches, Iran’s new reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has promised to ease enforcement of the headscarf law. But the murky details of Badri’s shooting and a recent video of a girl being manhandled in the streets of Tehran show the dangers still lurking for those willing to disobey it.
“They have elevated it to the most serious crime, where the police is allowed basically to shoot to kill,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran. “That’s really a war on women.”
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