Iranian Women Chop Hair, Dance On Streets & Burn Their Hijabs In Protest Against Dress Code
Protests raged for a fifth straight day across Iran on Tuesday as women took to streets and burned hijabs after the death in custody of a woman detained for breaking conservative hijab laws. Authorities said three people had been killed during the demonstrations so far.
The death last week of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini who was arrested by morality police for "unsuitable attire" unleashed a flood of simmering anger over numerous issues including rights, security and an economy reeling from international sanctions.
Protests flare up across Iran
An Iranian woman was seen chopping her hair in public in the capital Tehran in a video that was uploaded on Twitter. This video follows several others on social media of women chopping off their hair and setting their hijabs on fire to protest the custodial death of 22-year-old Mahsa and the hijab laws.
In?Kerman's Azadi Square, a woman was seen sitting on top of a utility box, taking off her headscarf and cutting her hair as people chant "death to the dictator".??
In Sari, north of Tehran, large crowds cheered as women set their hijabs alight and danced on the streets in defiant acts of protest.??
?In the city of Mashhad, a woman climbs atop a police car tonight shouting "we don't want the Islamic Republic" as protesters set fire to a police car.
Riot police?confronted by protesters
Protesters took to the streets elsewhere in Tehran chanting anti-Khamenei slogans and police fired tear gas to disperse them, the semi-official Fars news agency reported in a rare admission by state-affiliated media of the scale of unrest.
In Kerman city centre, protesters directly confronted riot police and plainclothes officers, preventing them from beating and arresting fellow protesters.
Death sparked fury among women
The young Iranian woman who fell into a coma after being arrested in Tehran died last Friday, state media and her family said, with activists urging those responsible for her "suspicious" death be brought to justice.
Mahsa was on a visit with her family to the Iranian capital when she was detained last Tuesday by the police unit responsible for enforcing the Islamic republic's strict dress code for women, which include the compulsory wearing of the headscarf in public.
Witnesses have revealed that Mahsa was beaten inside a police van which the country¡¯s police have denied.
However, hours after her arrest, Mahsa's family was notified that she had been taken down to the Kasra hospital where she was moved to an intensive-care unit. The police said that she suffered a heart attack, a claim the family has strongly opposed saying that she was healthy until she was arrested.
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