A woman stands on a car and salutes the crowd gathering for the 40th day ceremony for Mahsa Amini, who died in Iranian police custody on September 16

Jump to Original Entry

UPDATES: Striking Workers and University Students Maintain Iran’s Hijab-Amini Protests

“Nothing to Lose”: The Schoolgirls at the Forefront of Iran’s Hijab-Amini Protests

Iran’s Hijab Protests Challenge Legitimacy of A Weakened Regime

UPDATE 1541 GMT:

Protests have been renewed in Zahedan in Sistan and Baluchestan Province in southeast Iran, where security forces killed at 66 worshippers and demonstrators on September 30.

Gunfire is reported again today, and authorities have shut down the Internet.

A march in Sarevan in the same province:

UPDATE 0947 GMT:

A scene in Tehran on Thursday night:

UPDATE 0605 GMT:

Iranian security agents have seized the body of journalist Reza Haghighatnejad, preventing his funeral.

Haghighatnejad, 45, died from cancer on October 17 in a Berlin hospital. His body was flown to Iran on Tuesday for burial in his hometown of Shiraz.

But sources told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty/Radio Farda, where Haghighatnejad worked since 2019, that Revolutionary Guards operatives took the body to an unknown location.

Haghighatnejad’s family is being pressured by authorities to bury him in a cemetery outside Shiraz.

UPDATE, OCT 28:

Iranian authorities confirm that security forces killed three people on Thursday in Mahabad in northwest Iran.

Protesters were remembering a 35-year-old man, Ismael Moloudi, slain Wednesday. Iranian officials claimed a group of people attacked government and security organizations.

UPDATE 1644 GMT:

Protesters in Khorramabad in western Iran remember Nika Shahkarami, 16, killed by security forces on September 20 (see below), “From Luristan to Kurdistan, I’ll sacrifice myself for Iran”.

UPDATE 1638 GMT:

The Internet has reportedly been cut off in Mahabad in western Iran in an effort to contain protests.

Women demonstrating in the city console the mother of a protester slain by security forces.

UPDATE 1318 GMT:

A rally in Kurdistan in northwest Iran:

Also in northwest Iran:

And in Iran’s second city of Mashhad:

UPDATE 0944 GMT:

New evidence points to the detention and murder of 16-year-old Nika Shahkarami by Iranian security forces.

Iranian officials have insisted that Shahkarami committed suicide by jumping off a rooftop. Her mother has disputed the story, saying her daughter showed marks of a serious beating with a broken nose and dislocated cheekbone. A death certificate confirms that she received multiple blows.

Now CNN has assembled the footage and testimony of the last hours of Shahkarami’s life on September 20.

In the evening, she stood on top of an overturned garbage bin, waving her headscarf as it was engulfed by flames with chants of “Death to the Dictator” ringing. She collected another scarf from a friend and set it on fire.

Another demonstrator, Najmeh, recalled, “I remember how brave she was because she would go up on the garbage bin and wouldn’t come down. She also burned her head scarf.”

About an hour later, she was chased by Iranian security forces. Video shows her ducking behind a white car and yelling “tekoon nakon, tekoon nakon” (“don’t move, don’t move”) to the driver before running away from the short-lived shelter.

An eyewitness, Ladan, said Nika was then taken into custody ​“several large-bodied plainclothes security officers” who bundled her into a car. She said of the evening:

I wanted to save her, but I couldn’t. There were about 20 or 30 Basijis [militiamen] on motorcycles on the sidewalk​.

​Shahkarami was throwing rocks at them. I was scared and I even went past her and said, “Be careful dear!” because there were a number of plainclothes police in the streets going through the cars looking for her.

Fifty meters ahead they got her.

Another witness, Reza, said, “I saw with my own eyes security forces hitting women with batons, and they grabbed many of them and took them to police vans.”

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Protests across Iran surged on Wednesday, the 40th day of the death of Mahsa Amini, detained and allegedly beaten by “morality police” for “inappropriate” wearing of the hijab.

Defying repression and restrictions on the Internet, there were confirmed protests in at least 37 towns and cities.

Authorities tried to prevent a ceremony at Amini’s grave, up to 10,000 people lined the road en route to the cemetery outside her hometown of Saqqez in the Kurdistan Province in northwest Iran. Chants included “Death to the Dictator” , “Woman, Life, Freedom”, and “Kurdistan, Kurdistan, the Graveyard of Fascists”.

In Saqqez’s Zindan Square, security forces fired tear gas. Kurdish human rights group Hengaz said more than 50 civilians were injured by direct fire in cities across the region.

Meanwhile, students continued to challenge the Iranian regime at universities throughout the country. On campuses in Tehran and Najafabad, they tore down posters of the Supreme Leader and the late Ayatollah Khomeini. In Mashhad, they rallied as a small fire burned in a building next to the portraits of the clerics. At Al-Zahra University in Tehran, they chanted, “You are lewd and debauched, I’m a free woman!”.

Women at Shahid Chamran University in Ahwaz in southern Iran shout, “Azadi! (Freedom!)”.

Strikes gathered strength with workers at the Tehran oil refinery walking out, and doctors were among those staging demonstrations. Hengaw reported Hengaw reported strikes across Kurdistan — Saqqez, Divandarreh, Marivan, Kamyaran, and Sanandaj — and in Javanrud and Ravansar in Kermanshah Province in western Iran.

Protests on Saadi Street in Tehran: