The 22-year-old Iranian girl, Mahsa Amini, died
in a coma after being arrested by the religious police in Tehran.
The Iranian law enforcement officers
stopped her three days ago because she was not wearing her veil correctly
.
As reported by several independent Iranian media, the girl died at the Kasra hospital in the capital, where
people immediately began to gather as a sign of solidarity and protest
after news of her death began to circulate.
Videos published on social media and also relaunched by BBC journalists show a strong presence of security agents outside the clinic: the girl's name had become a trend topic on Twitter in Farsi these days, with several important Iranian personalities, such as the Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi and actress Golshifteh Farahani, who reported the incident on social media.
The 22-year-old was arrested on Tuesday afternoon while visiting Tehran with relatives for not wearing the veil correctly and
was taken to a police station to attend "an hour of re-education
," her family denounced.
A few hours later, she was admitted to Kasra hospital in a coma
: the authorities' version of her is that she had a heart attack, but her mother and brother reported that she was in excellent health.
The police confirmed the arrest only yesterday and explained that Amini "suddenly had a heart problem and was immediately taken to the hospital".
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, has ordered the Interior Ministry to open an investigation
to clarify the matter.
For its part,
Amnesty International has once again denounced the law on the obligation of the veil for women in Iran as "degrading and discriminatory".
The girl's death comes after repeated and persistent reports of repressive acts against women in Iran, including those deemed non-compliant with the Islamic dress code
who have been barred from entering government offices and stalls
.
Many Iranians, including pro-government individuals, are expressing their outrage on social media platforms at the very existence of the moral police, and are using hashtags that can be translated as "assassin patrols."
Videos have surfaced on social media showing agents detaining women, dragging them to the ground and forcibly taking them away.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, the law in force in Iran has required women, Iranian and foreign and whatever their religion, to cover their heads and wear loose clothing that covers their shapes.
The zeal of the authorities on this issue had significantly diminished under the previous rule of the pragmatic president, Hassan Rohani, and a growing number of Iranian women in Tehran and other major cities often leave their hair almost uncovered.
In recent months, however, under the presidency of the ultra-conservative Raisi, police interventions to enforce the obligation of the veil have multiplied.