Iranian police killed a 21-year-old Kurdish woman, Negin Abdulmalaki, on 12 October during protests against the killing of Jîna (Mhasa) Amini in the Kurdish-majority city of Hamadan, the human rights watchdog Hengaw reported.
Hengaw alleged that police beat Negin Abdulmalaki with a baton, causing such fatal injuries that the student died just a short time later at a university dormitory. The security forces threatened her friends and family with grave consequences if they reported her death to the media, according to Hengaw.
“After learning about Negin’s death, university security, along with a number of government authorities, went to the dormitory and began threatening the students who knew about the incident,” a student told Hengaw.
Abdulmalaki’s family were summoned by the authorities, who ordered them to tell the public that she had died because of eating expired canned fish, Hengaw added.
Abdulmalaki was a medical engineering student at the Hamadan University of Technology. She died while participating in the recent protests over the death of 22-year-old Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, who died on 16 September of injuries suffered while she was detained by Tehran morality police for ‘improperly’ wearing the compulsory hijab.
Iran’s security is behaving with particular brutality in the western Kurdish regions of the country, where they have raided schools and universities, arrested hundreds of students and broadcast their forced confessions on television.
On 23 October, security forces accompanied by state-run media raided a girls’ high school in Javanrood forcing the students there to speak to the press and to publicly deny that security forces had arrested their friends, Hengaw reported.
The Iranian authorities have responded to protests over Amini’s killing by launching a violent crackdown. According to human rights groups from Iran, almost 12,500 people have been arrested and nearly 250 killed since the beginning of the street protests.
