Mahsa Amini was detained after police found fault with her hijab

Women in Iran are chopping their hair and burning their hijabs in protest over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who died while being detained by police.
Protests erupted in Iran after Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old died while in detention by police in Iran.

Mahsa Amini
Amini was detained on Tuesday after Iran’s police found fault with her hijab. Amini was reportedly brutally beaten. The Iranian police have denied the allegations and claim that she died of a heart attack. A relative of Amini’s said that she had no history of heart disease.

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist on her social media account shared a video of women cutting their hair and wrote, "Iranian women show their anger by cutting their hair and burning their hijab to protest against the killing of #Mahsa_Amini by hijab police." “From the age of 7 if we don’t cover our hair we won’t be able to go to school or get a job. We are fed up with this gender apartheid regime,” she wrote.

“To the world who still don’t know that in Iran #WalkingUnveiled is a punishable crime. Yes, these women who removed their hijab can get jailed, beaten & kicked out from job. But like the women’s suffrage movement, Iranian women making history,” she wrote in another tweet.

British-Iranian actor Nazanin Boniadi tweeted, “To anyone normalizing forced hijab as a "cultural" dress code: There’s nothing cultural about something that is widely opposed by the people of that culture to the point where some even risk being imprisoned, tortured or killed for protesting against it. #MahsaAmini“

Iranian police fired tear gas to disperse a protest in the western, mainly Kurdish city of Sanandaj, where hundreds rallied to decry the death of a young woman while in police custody in Tehran last week, reports said.

The semi-official Fars news agency reported late Sunday that police also arrested several people from about 500 protesters who had gathered on Sunday at Azadi Square in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province.

Fars said the protesters smashed car windows and set fire to street garbage cans. The agency’s website carried a brief video showing scores of men and women protesting, claiming the police’s explanation about Amini’s death was not reasonable."

AE News