Iran is seeking to limit outrage over a recent police shooting that seriously wounded a 31-year-old woman in her car after rights activists alleged she had been targeted for refusing to wear a mandatory hijab.
Iranian state news site Tasnim published a video Monday of Arezou Badri, a mother of two, as she lay in a hospital bed in Tehran. Rights activists have said she was left partially paralyzed after police opened fire on her vehicle as she was driving with her sister in northern Iran’s Mazandaran province on July 22.
The activists have cited sources in Iran as saying police shot Badri because her car was under a confiscation order for her refusal to wear a mandatory hijab in the vehicle.
Iranian authorities toughened enforcement this year of Islamist laws that require women and girls to cover their hair with a hijab in public, even inside a vehicle. Iranian morality police enforcing those laws in 2022 detained and assaulted another young woman, Mahsa Amini, whose death in their custody sparked months of nationwide protests against Iran’s authoritarian Islamist rulers.
In the Tasnim video, a reporter holding a microphone toward the bedridden Badri asks whether she is feeling better and eating well, and she makes several brief responses in the affirmative. Her father, standing next to the bed, also tells the reporter that his daughter is feeling better.
Iranian state media have said police opened fire on Badri’s car because orders to stop were ignored. An Iranian judiciary spokesman told a Tuesday press conference that the shooter was detained and placed under investigation, but denied there was any connection to mandatory hijab enforcement.
Iranian women’s rights activist and VOA Persian TV host Masih Alinejad published the first social media photos and video of the hospitalized Badri after the shooting, with Alinejad saying she obtained them from an informed source.
In an interview for VOA’s Flashpoint podcast, published Friday, Alinejad said the Tasnim video of Badri and her father appeared to have been coerced by Iranian authorities.
"My sources told me that authorities tried to pressure Arezou and her family members to say on camera that the shooting had nothing to do with the mandatory hijab issue. So far, the family has resisted, and the authorities have failed. But at the same time, their lives are at risk [from further pressure]," Alinejad said.
She said Iranian authorities are seeking to prevent hijab-related controversies and protests from erupting as Iran approaches the second anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death next month.
VOA has not seen any reports from Iran of street protests related to the shooting of Badri since Alinejad began posting social media images and information about her case on July 29.
"The Iranian regime is trying to control the information. That is why there are so few people learning about what is going on in the hospital where Arezou is under pressure," Alinejad said.
But she added that her social media posts about Badri’s case have prompted some individual acts of protest.
"As soon as I published information on my social media, I got videos from Iranian women walking unveiled in the street, referring to Arezou," Alinejad said. "Those women said: 'We are not going to give up. We know what happened to Arezou, but we will still take off our hijab and walk in the street until the day that we are free.'"
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a VOA request for comment, sent on Friday, about the shooting of Badri.
VOA’s Persian Service contributed to this report.
