Iranian journalist who broke news on Mahsa Amini pays heavy price

Niloofar Hamedi, an Iranian journalist specialising in women’s rights, were given away with difficult-hitting memories for years – till the day she took a photograph of Mahsa Amini’s mother and father hugging each different in a Tehran clinic in which their daughter changed into mendacity in a coma.

The picture, which Hamedi posted on Twitter on September 16, turned into the first signal to the world that every one was not nicely with 22-year-vintage Amini, who were detained 3 days earlier by way of Iran’s morality police for what they deemed inappropriate get dressed.Amini’s loss of life later that day might unleash a wave of mass protests throughout Iran that were nevertheless persisting almost three weeks later in distinctive elements of the usa, in spite of a government crackdown.

The image of Amini’s dad and mom was additionally one of the remaining matters Hamedi, worked for the seasoned-reform Sharq daily, could publish earlier than she changed into arrested some days later and her Twitter account indexed as suspended.

“This morning, intelligence agents raided my client Niloofar Hamedi’s house, arrested her, searched her residence, and confiscated her assets,” Hamedi’s lawyer Mohammad Ali Kamfirouzi tweeted on September 22.

Hamedi has not been charged and is being held in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin prison, he wrote.Facing one of the boldest demanding situations to the Islamic Republic because the 1979 revolution, the authorities have used force to suppress the most important public display of dissent in years.

At least 185 humans, along with 19 minors, were killed,masses injured and heaps had been arrested by securityforces, in step with rights organizations. The Iranian government saysmore than 20 security forces were killed and that it’ll inspect civilian deaths.The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on Iranian authorities to “immediately and unconditionally launch … All newshounds arrested because of their insurance of Mahsa Amini’s loss of life and the protests that have followed”.

It said last month that at the least 28 journalists had been detained with the aid of the security forces, consisting of Hamedi.

Friends of Hamedi described her as a brave journalist who’s obsessed with girls’s issues and rights. Her investigative articles cover subjects consisting of self-immolation amongst girls suffering home abuse, and she or he interviewed the own family of Sepideh Rashno, an Iranian writer and artist, who become arrested in July for defying the Islamic dress code.

“She usually went beyond her limit to be the voice of voiceless women who have been disadvantaged from their rights, whether or not by means of their fathers, husbands or through social obstacles,” one buddy of hers instructed Reuters, for fear of reprisals.

The Iranian government have blamed the violence on an array of enemies which include armed Iranian Kurdish dissidents, with the Revolutionary Guards attacking their bases in neighbouring Iraq a number of times during the latest unrest.

“We desire Hamedi returns to the office. Put her bag on the table… Write approximately the disadvantaged and nameless ladies who are sufferers of prejudice in Iran,” wrote her editor Shahrzad Hemmati on October eleven.