All posts tagged: Iran

Shooting of former boxing champion highlights brutality of Iran’s ‘morality police’

Published by Ershad Alijani

It all started as a citation for an improperly worn headscarf, but the incident escalated when former Iranian boxing champion Reza Moradkhani was shot four times by Iran’s “morality police” on April 28, after they questioned his wife. The incident, which left him severely injured, adds to the long list of abuses by the morality police, known for their brutal enforcement of a strict Islamic dress code. Following the altercation with the morality police, known in Iran as the Gasht-e Ershad, Reza Moradkhani, a former member of the Iranian national boxing team and boxing champion in Asia, underwent 12 hours of surgery for his injuries and is now partially paralysed. Moradkhani and his wife, Maria Arefi, also a boxer, submitted a lawsuit against the morality police officer after the shooting, saying that they were advised: “not to go public with the story”. But in June, the court dismissed their case and the couple went to the media. READ MORE: Inside Iran’s “morality police” – women use their smartphones to fight back Suddenly the officer took out …

‘Instead of rescue teams, they sent riot police’: Building collapse triggers outrage in Iran

Published by Ershad Alijani

The deadly collapse of a building under construction on May 23 in Abadan, a city in Iran’s Khuzestan province, has sparked a wave of outrage in the country. At least 41 people died in the tragedy and dozens are still missing. Two weeks after the collapse, hundreds of protestors blaming the authorities for negligence and corruption are still in the streets. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called for those responsible for the tragedy to be prosecuted and punished. The regional judiciary also announced that it had arrested thirteen people, including the mayor of Abadan and two of its former mayors. The protests, however, are not letting up. Protesters accuse the owner of the 10-storey building, Hossein Abdolbaghi, a businessman close to the government, of corruption. The unrest has spread to other towns across the southwestern region of Iran. Emergency workers are still pulling bodies from the rubble. On June 6, the death toll rose to 41, Iranian officials said, but they fear that more bodies have yet to be recovered. Residents worry that …

Iran’s failed Covid-19 vaccination campaign due to ‘political power struggle’

Published by Ershad Alijani

Iran’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign has been rife with complications: videos shared online show queues up to a hundred metres long as people wait for hours to be vaccinated, with doses sometimes running out long before everyone receives their jab. Others show thousands of people rushing to the border with Armenia in search of a dose. According to our Observer, an Iranian doctor, these predicaments are the result of political rivalries and the failure of Iran’s vaccine strategy. In Iran, a country of 82 million people, only 4.7 million people have received their first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, while just 2.2 million are fully vaccinated. So far, people 60 years of age and older are the only ones eligible for vaccination. Videos shared online show elderly men and women waiting in line for hours before they can get vaccinated. Many others – mostly young, middle-class Iranians who are not yet eligible for vaccination and don’t expect to receive their vaccines in Iran anytime soon – have found their solution abroad, either in Dubai or Armenia, …

Video of street drug use illustrates Iran’s growing addiction problem

Published by Ershad Alijani

A video posted on Telegram in Iran on May 16 shows dozens of men and women openly consuming drugs on a Tehran street. Some inhale amphetamines while others inject heroin, in a scene that shocked many Iranians. According to our Observers, this video illustrates a growing addiction problem that has become more and more visible in the streets of southern Tehran. The video was taken in Neshati Alley, a street in an impoverished neighbourhood of southern Tehran. Although the exact date the video was taken is unknown, this phenomenon is becoming increasingly more common. According to our Observers, more and more open drug use has taken place in these neighbourhoods over the past two years. Places like Neshati Alley, in the Shush neighbourhood, are known as regular gathering points for drug users, many of them homeless. A 2-minute video recorded on an unknown date in southern Tehran shows men and women openly consuming heroin and amphetamine in the street. This 2-minute video shows a typical scene in one of southern Tehran’s neighbourhoods. People gathered on …

From hospitals to amusement parks, Iranians grapple with surprise power outages

Published by Ershad Alijani

Lifts and amusement park rides grinding to a halt, businesses, and employees left in the dark, hospital equipment stopping suddenly … People around Iran have been experiencing regular power outages since the beginning of May. While the state energy distributor has tried to schedule these outages to align with energy demands, our Observers tell us that power cuts have been more frequent, and lengthier, than planned. Iranians have been reporting daily, prolonged power cuts since early May, leading to widespread inconveniences and dangerous consequences. People have been left without air conditioning, internet connections, water, and even life-saving medical devices. The Iran Grid Management Company (IGMC), responsible for electricity provision in Iran, released a timetable for scheduled power outages around the country, which they say have resulted from insufficient energy production. As Iranian citizens adapt to these inconveniences, the source of the power outages remains unclear. While an IGMC announcement on May 23 cited insufficient energy production levels, energy officials have pointed to several potential causes. Some referenced energy-intensive Bitcoin farms in Iran, while others blamed …

The real scam behind Iran’s underground female MMA fights

Published by Ershad Alijani

On May 27, a video of what appears to be a professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fight between two women began to make the rounds on Iranian social media. The match, which took place in the suburbs of Tehran, caught the attention of many. It was the first time that an underground MMA fight – forbidden for women in the Islamic Republic – was caught on tape. But according to our Observer, this video actually shows a widespread scam taking advantage of female MMA hopefuls. Just like underground female bodybuilding competitions or ballet dancing, these female MMA tournaments are kept under wraps but well known among sportsmen and journalists in Iran. Now, for the first time, a video of this phenomenon was released. The video, which according to our Observer was filmed in Shahriar, a suburb of Iran’s capital Tehran, shows two women fighting MMA-style in a boxing ring located in what seems to be a private villa. We hear two other women coaching the fighters as well as a man who advises the referee …

Hiding a symbolic mass grave of political prisoners by forcing a persecuted minority to bury top of it

Published by Ershad Alijani

Members of Iran’s persecuted Baha’i community were shocked when, in April, the government announced that the only place they would be able to bury their loved ones was on top of mass graves containing political prisoners executed in the 1980s. Activists say this policy is an attempt by the government to erase any trace of the mass executions carried out by the Islamic Republic. These photos, which were published on Telegram in April, show about a dozen freshly dug graves, two of which contain bodies, in an overgrown patch in Khavaran cemetery, located to the east of Tehran. But the unassuming field is actually the site of mass graves containing the bodies of political prisoners who were executed in the years following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the majority of them in 1988. These photos show graves recently dug by members of the Baha’i community in Khavaran, a site that already contains mass graves from the 1980s. These photos were taken on April 23 and published on Telegram. According to Article 13 of the Iranian Constitution, …

‘There isn’t a single stretcher left’ in Iran as ‘apocalyptic’ wave of Covid-19 hits

Published by Ershad Alijani

Iranians are facing a fourth wave of Covid-19 and it is shaping up to be the worst since the start of the pandemic. According to official figures, there are no beds left in life support units anywhere in Iran. And there are no beds available in any units of the 100 hospitals in Tehran, the capital. With no hope of rapid, widespread vaccination any time soon, healthcare workers are at a crisis point. Around 500 people a day are dying of Covid-19 in Iran, according to official statistics, though the actual number could be higher. The official pandemic death toll has risen to 70,000— a number that, according to Iran’s Scientific Council, has been underreported and could, in reality, be four times higher. READ MORE: Authorities in Iran ‘hiding’ COVID-19 deaths by listing other causes on death reports Last year, the FRANCE 24 Observers team published a series of articles about the way the pandemic had severely impacted the country, but all of the healthcare workers that we interviewed in the past few days said …

Torture and humiliation reported norm at Iran’s rehab facilities

Published by Ershad Alijani

A video that started circulating on Telegram on January 29 shows staff at a rehab facility in Iran forcing patients to swim in a pool of freezing water, while others are beaten with a baton. According to our Observer, this kind of cruelty is commonplace in Iran’s rehab facilities. The video was filmed on January 13 in the Nourandishan rehab facility, where the majority of people in the facility were placed by judicial order. The centre is located in Qalat, a village about 45 kilometres from the city of Shiraz, in central Iran. On January 30, the Shiraz district attorney announced that five men had been arrested in connection with the incident shown in the video. The footage shows the rehab centre’s employees forcing patients to swim in an icy pool, even though outside temperatures were fluctuating between -3 and 2 degrees Celsius (26.6 to 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The footage also shows staff hitting patients with batons and shouting insults like “son of a b…” . “Yeah, it’s another universe here, it’s Qalat,” says the …