Tehran: A video clip, which went viral on the social media, shows schoolgirls interrupting a speech by an Iranian official in the paramilitary Basij forces, after anti-government protests reached schools.
The schoolgirls are shown waving their headscarves and chanting the slogan “Basij, leave” in the face of the man who was going to give them a speech.
The Basij forces helped the security services quell the protests, which erupted after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, suffered a heart attack and then passed away, while she was detained by morality police for “not wearing the hijab properly”.
Other video images, spread on social media, show a man shouting: “Death to the dictator,” while a group of girls were walking in the street, in the city of Sanandaj, northwest of the country, and an elderly woman clapping for girls without headscarves chanting “Freedom, freedom, freedom”, in the street.
In other video clip, a professor threatens to expel schoolgirls if they refuse to cover their heads at a sit-in in the school yard.
This development comes a day after the security forces besieged the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, to suppress student protests there. Dozens of them were reportedly beaten and taken, blindfolded, to unknown locations.
Protests erupted in Iran after a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini fell into a coma and died while in the custody of Iran’s morality police for wearing the hijab in an ‘improper manner’ meaning she had not fully covered her hair.
Amini fell into a coma shortly after collapsing at a detention centre before she was pronounced dead on Friday, September 16.
This angered the Iranians, who went out and are still taking to the streets in large numbers, to demand the punishment of the perpetrators and the dissolution of the morality police, including those who demanded the overthrow of the regime as a whole.
Women have been at the forefront of the protests since their outbreak, but this is the first time that schoolgirls have participated in large numbers.
At least 92 protesters have been killed so far in the unrest, said Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).
