More violence as Iran protests enter fourth week
Schoolgirls chanted slogans, workers went on strike and protesters clashed violently with security forces across Iran on Saturday, as demonstrations over the death of Mahsa Amini entered a fourth week. Anger flared after the 22-year-old Iranian Kurd's death on September 16, three days after her arrest in Tehran by the notorious morality police for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women. Iran said on Friday an investigation found Amini had died of a longstanding illness rather than "blows" to the head, despite her family reportedly saying she had previously been healthy. But the women-led protests continued even as ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi posed for a group photograph with students at Tehran's all-female Al-Zahra University to mark the new academic year. Young women on the same campus were seen shouting "Death to the oppressor", said the Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR). In Amini's hometown Saqez, in Kurdistan province, schoolgirls chanted "Woman, life, freedom" and marched down a street swinging headscarves in the air, in videos the Hengaw rights group said were recorded on Saturday. Gruesome videos were widely shared online of a man who was shot dead while sitting at the wheel of his car in Sanandaj, Kurdistan's capital. The province's police chief, Ali Azadi, said he was "killed by anti-revolutionary forces". Angry men appeared to take revenge on a member of the feared Basij militia in Sanandaj, swarming around him and beating him badly, in a widely shared video. Internet monitor Netblocks reported outages in Sanandaj, and national mobile network disruptions. Another shocking video shows a young woman said to have been shot dead in Mashhad, in what many on social media compared to footage of Neda Agha Soltan, a young woman who became an enduring symbol of the opposition after being shot dead at protests in 2009. (AFP)