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Five people were killed in Iran’s Kurdish region on Monday when security forces opened fire during protests over the death of a woman in police custody, a Kurdish rights group said, on a third day of turmoil over an incident that has ignited nationwide anger.
Public anger has grown since authorities on Friday announced the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, in a hospital after three days in a coma, following her arrest by Tehran’s morality police during a visit to the capital on September 13.
Demonstrations were held in Tehran, including in several universities, and the second city Mashhad, according to the Fars and Tasnim news agencies.
Protesters marched down Hijab Street -- or “headscarf street” -- in central Tehran denouncing the morality police, the ISNA news agency reported.
“Several hundred people chanted slogans against the authorities, some of them took off their hijab,” Fars said, adding that “police arrested several people and dispersed the crowd using batons and tear gas”.
A brief video released by Fars showed a crowd of several dozen people, including women who had removed their headscarves, shouting “Death to the Islamic republic!”
A “similar gathering” took place in the northeastern city of Mashhad, the Tasnim agency reported.
On Sunday, police made arrests and fired tear gas in the dead woman’s home province of Kurdistan, where some 500 people had protested, some smashing car windows and torching rubbish bins, reports said.
Anger
The morality police units enforce a dress code in the Islamic republic that demands women wear headscarves in public.
It also bans tight trousers, ripped jeans, clothes that expose the knees and brightly coloured outfits.
Police have insisted there was “no physical contact” between officers and the victim. Tehran police chief General Hossein Rahimi said Monday the woman had violated the dress code, and that his colleagues had asked her relatives to bring her “decent clothes”.
