Iran arrests woman after solo university protest: Reports
TEHRAN
Ahoo Daryaei had removed her clothes in protest and sat outside the university dressed only in her underwear before defiantly walking down the street, according to social media videos.
Iranian authorities have arrested a female student after she stripped to her underwear outside her university in Iran in what some student and rights groups say was a protest against the country’s strict Islamic dress code, several reports said on Nov. 3.
A video circulating on social media and shared by rights group Amnesty International shows the woman sat outside the university in her underwear and with her hair uncovered.
She gestures toward her fellow students, many of whom are female and wearing headscarves, before strolling around the premises.
Another video shows her walking down a road, still in a state of undress, before a group of men surround her, bundle her into a car and drive away.
Amnesty said that the woman had been “violently arrested” after she protested the “abusive enforcement” of the dress code at Tehran’s Islamic Azad University.
The woman, identified as Ahoo Daryaei, had been harassed inside Tehran’s prestigious university by members of the Basij paramilitary force.
The forces ripped Daryaei’s headscarf and clothes – leading to her staging a protest by stripping to her underwear outside the university.
The woman was initially taken to a police station and then transferred to a psychiatric center under the police control, according to the Telegram channel for the Iranian newspaper Farhikhtegan. A spokesperson for the university said the "real motive" of the act is still under investigation.
Under the dress code mandatory in Iran, women must wear a headscarf and loose-fitting clothes in public.
Near-nationwide protests erupted in 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman who had been arrested for an alleged breach of the dress code.
