Iran protests following death of Mahsa Amini enter fourth week

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Schoolgirls chanted slogans, workers went on strike and protesters clashed violently with security forces across Iran on Saturday, as demonstrations over the death of Mahsa Amini entered a fourth week.

Anger flared after the 22-year-old Iranian Kurd’s death on September 16, three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s strict dress code for women.

Iran said on Friday an investigation found Amini had died of a longstanding illness rather than “blows” to the head, despite her family reportedly saying she had previously been healthy.

Amini’s father told London-based Iran International that he rejected the official report.

“I saw with my own eyes that blood had come from Mahsa’s ears and back of her neck,” the outlet quoted him as saying Saturday.

The women-led protests continued even as ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi posed for a group photograph with students at Tehran’s all-woman Al-Zahra University to mark the new academic year.

Young women on the same campus were heard shouting “Death to the oppressor”, said the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).

In Amini’s hometown Saqez, in Kurdistan province, schoolgirls chanted “Woman, life, freedom” and marched down a street swinging headscarves in the air, in videos the Hengaw rights group said were recorded on Saturday.

Gruesome videos were widely shared online of a man who was shot dead while sitting at the wheel of his car in Sanandaj, Kurdistan’s capital.

The province’s police chief, Ali Azadi, said he was “killed by anti-revolutionary forces”.

Angry men appeared to take revenge on a member of the feared Basij militia in Sanandaj, swarming around him and beating him badly, in a widely shared video.