The Coordinating Council of Teachers Syndicates of Iran (CCTSI) reported on Wednesday that Iranian security forces beat a 16-year-old girl student named Asra Panahi to death after forcing her to attend a rally in support of the government, where she allegedly refused to sing a pro-regime song.
Protests have been sweeping Iran ever since its thuggish “morality police” killed a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini five weeks ago for supposedly wearing her mandatory headscarf improperly. Many of the protesters are female students who have been casting aside their own headscarves and making bold gestures of defiance against the theocratic regime.
According to a statement from the teacher’s union in Panahi’s hometown of Ardabil, Iranian authorities illegally forced girls from Shahed High School to attend a pro-government rally last Tuesday.
Once the girls had been marched to the designated area, they were ordered to sing a song praising the theocracy. Some of them refused and sang a protest chant instead, prompting regime thugs to verbally and physically assault them. Seven students were injured, including Asra Panahi, who later died of her injuries in the hospital.
The teacher’s union said regime operatives raided the school after the disobedient girls returned and assaulted several more of the students. Police arrested ten students from the school.
Iranians who live in Brazil protest against the death of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who died in Iran while in police custody, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Friday, Sept. 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
As with the killing of Mahsa Amini, the regime claimed Panahi had some sort of underlying “health condition” that caused her to suffer a heart attack after security forces administered a perfectly reasonable beating, and one of the girl’s relatives — in Panahi’s case, her uncle — was trotted onto state television to back up the regime’s claims.
A person in Cairo looks on October 20, 2022 at a tweet about the reported death of 15-year-old Iranian girl Asra Panahi. (-/AFP via Getty Images)
London-based Persian-language TV channel Manoto reported on Wednesday that Asra Panahi’s brother Mohammad Reza Panahi attempted suicide after his sister died and has been rushed to a hospital in Ardabil for “drug poisoning.” Manoto TV added that “security agents of the Islamic Republic are present at the hospital.”
Regime forces also killed two other young girls named Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh during the protests and, in both cases, Iranian officials claimed they died from “underlying conditions” and produced relatives of the victims to say as much on state television.
In a Wednesday post on its Instagram account, CCTSI called the actions of Iranian security forces toward Panahi and the other students “brazenly illegal,” “brutal,” and “inhuman.”
“What’s worse is that some puppet administrators of the schools, contrary to their legal and humanitarian duty, cooperated with the repression forces,” the union said. “And these ugly acts are carried out by the orders of regional heads, general managers, and with a green light from the incompetent minister of education.”
CCTSI called for the principal and deputy principal of Panahi’s school to resign immediately, and for higher education officials to conduct a full and transparent investigation of the student’s death.
Radio Free Europe (RFE) reported on Tuesday that former Iranian soccer star Ali Daei has become involved in the Panahi case, demanding the truth from officials and denouncing Ardabil parliamentarian Kazem Musavi for floating a rumor that Panahi committed suicide.
“History has proven who the liars are,” Daei said.
The Iranian government has so far refused to provide an honest account of how many people were killed in its crackdown on the Amini protests, but human rights groups believe at least two dozen children under 18 are among the dead, many of them impoverished Kurds like Amini, or members of the equally oppressed and restless Baloch minority.
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