“I saw with my own eyes that blood had come out of Mahsa’s ears and neck,” the London-based Persian-language TV station Iran International quoted the 22-year-old’s father as saying.
The Forensic Medicine Organization of Iran (IMO) said on Friday that Amini died “not from beatings” but from the effects of a surgical procedure that was performed on her at the age of eight for a brain tumor.
Mahsa Amini died on September 16 after being arrested by vice squads in Tehran three days earlier on charges of not wearing her headscarf in accordance with regulations. According to activists, she was beaten in police custody and died of a head injury. The police deny any responsibility for the death of the young woman. Amini’s death sparked a wave of protests against the oppression of women in Iran.
Iran’s ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi appeared at the start of the semester with students from Tehran’s Al-Sahra Women’s University. At the same time, young women on campus chanted “Death to the oppressor,” according to the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).
Raisi said the Iranian students would not fall for the “enemy” and that they would fail. He blames foreign forces for the wave of protests against the leadership in Tehran. On Saturday evening he met the head of the judiciary and the speaker of parliament, as reported by the state news agency IRNA.
At a school in Amini’s hometown of Saghes in Kurdistan Province, girls chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom” and protesters took off their headscarves on the street and waved them over their heads, videos taken on Saturday showed, according to the Norway-based human rights organization Hengaw . Schoolgirls also protested in Sanandaj, the capital of the province of Kurdistan.
Horrific video footage of a man shot dead at the wheel of his car circulated online from Sanandaj. Provincial police chief Ali Asadi said the man was “killed by anti-revolutionary forces.” A video also circulating showed how angry men appeared to be chasing after a member of the city’s feared Bassij militia and beating the man.
Another video showed a young woman apparently shot dead in Mashhad.
A large banner was posted on a highway overpass in Tehran reading, “We are no longer afraid. We will fight,” images verified by AFP news agency showed.
In a video shared on the Internet, a man can be seen changing the lettering on a government poster from “The police are the servants of the people” to “The police are the murderers of the people”.
The Isna news agency reported a massive presence of security forces in Tehran and especially in the vicinity of universities. There are “isolated” gatherings in Tehran. Street protests also took place in Isfahan, Karaj, Shiraz, Tabriz and other cities, London-based Iran Wire reported.
Hengaw also reported “widespread strikes” in Saghes, Sanandaj and Diwandarreh in Kurdistan Province and in Mahabad in West Azerbaijan Province.
According to the human rights organization IHR, at least 95 people were killed when the authorities used violence against the demonstrators.
