On a dark road along the Caspian Sea, Iranian police opened fire last month on a 31-year-old woman who tried to drive away at high speed, probably knowing the police wanted to confiscate her vehicle.
Police were ordered to confiscate her car, activists say, because she had previously violated Iran’s headscarf law by showing her hair while driving in public.
Arezou Badri, a mother of two, is now unable to walk and confined to a bed in a police hospital. She is the latest victim of Iran’s renewed crackdown on headscarves, or hijabs. Her shooting came nearly two years after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody for allegedly violating the headscarf law, sparking nationwide protests for women’s rights and against the country’s theocracy.
September 16 marks the one-year anniversary of Amini’s death. Iran’s new reform-minded president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has promised to relax enforcement of the headscarf law. But the grim details of Badri’s shooting and a recent video of a girl being abused on the streets of Tehran show the dangers that still lurk for those willing to flout the law.
“They have elevated it to the most serious crime, so that the police can basically shoot with death,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran. “This is really a war against women.”
Badri’s shooting occurred on a coastal road in Iran’s northern Mazandaran province at around 11 p.m. on July 22 as she was driving home from a friend’s house with her sister, activists say. A brief report by Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted police colonel Ahmad Amini as saying that patrol officers had ordered a vehicle with tinted windows to stop, but it did not. It did not mention the hijab violation or the confiscation order.
Officers apparently fired at Badri’s car tires first, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran, which spoke to people familiar with the shooting. As Badri drove away, officers fired at the vehicle, the group said. The shots pierced her lungs and injured her spine.
Under Iranian law, police must fire a warning shot and then aim for injury below the waist before firing a potentially fatal shot at a suspect’s head or chest. If the suspect is driving a car, officers usually aim for the tires first.
It remains unclear why police initially stopped Badri’s car, but activists blame the warning of impoundment for violating the hijab requirement. It is also not known whether any of the police vehicles at the scene were equipped with a camera that recorded the shooting, or whether any police officers there were wearing a body camera.
There are no public statistics on fatal police shootings in Iran. Police training and tactics in handling firearms vary widely, with some police officers taking on more paramilitary roles in areas such as Iran’s restive Sistan and Baluchestan provinces.
Iran’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the country’s police force, did not respond to questions from The Associated Press about the shooting.
Authorities are holding Badri in a police hospital in Tehran under tight security. Her family is restricted from visiting her and is not allowed to take photos of her, activists say. Despite this, the BBC published a picture of Badri this week, drawing attention to her case.
“She has no feeling from the waist down and doctors have said that the coming months will show whether she is completely paralyzed,” said an activist in Iran who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.
The hijab became a focal point of demonstrations following the death of Amini in 2022. She died after being arrested for not wearing her headscarf against the wishes of the police. A United Nations panel found that Amini died as a result of “physical violence” used against her by the state.
Amini’s death sparked months of protests and a security crackdown that left over 500 people dead and over 22,000 arrested. After the mass demonstrations, police relaxed enforcement of hijab laws, but tightened them again in April under what authorities called the Noor (or “Light”) Plan.
The crackdown on hijabs continues to be widely discussed in Iran, although police and state media barely report on it. Many women continue to wear their hijabs loosely or draped over their shoulders when walking around Tehran. Women who drive without hijabs are likely to be tracked using surveillance cameras made by Chinese companies that compare their faces to a government-run photo database, Ghaemi said.
If they are stopped, physical confrontations can occur between the women and the police.
Surveillance footage released last week by Iranian reformist news website Ensaf shows a 14-year-old girl being abused by the morality police in Tehran. Her mother described her daughter’s head being slammed into an electrical box, one policewoman pulling her hair and another putting her foot on her neck. Police described the officers’ behavior as unprofessional but also accused the girl of using foul language.
“I saw my daughter with a bruised face, swollen lips, bruised neck and torn clothes, and she couldn’t even speak,” her mother Maryam Abbasi told the website. “Her eyes were so swollen from crying that she couldn’t open them.”
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