Concerns are growing for two Iranian journalists who helped draw attention to the death of Mahsa Amini, but activists who claim are now the target of a smear campaign portraying them as spies.
during the first round of protests that broke out later amini He died following his arrest by Iran’s ethics police, with Nilofar Hamidi and Ilahe Mohammadi being detained. The movement currently presents the government with its biggest obstacle since the 1979 revolution.
Hamidi covered the story from the hospital where the young woman spent her last three days in a coma before passing for Iran’s Sharg newspaper. According to the journalist’s family, he was taken into custody on September 20.
Ham Mihan newspaper reporter Mohammadi traveled to Amini’s hometown of Saqeez in the Kurdistan region of northwestern Iran to cover his funeral, which turned into one of the first protest actions. In custody since 29 September
According to social media posts by family members, the two women are still being held in Tehran’s Avin prison.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) based in New York, they are among 51 journalists who have been jailed as part of a wide-ranging crackdown since the protests began. Only 14 have been confirmed to have got bail.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) expressed its “deep concern” for the conditions of the two women in a statement.
It said he was being “detained without access to internationally recognized standards of due process” and “he could face years of imprisonment if convicted”.
Iranian intelligence officer Last week the pair were accused of being foreign agents whose status as journalists was “covered”.
According to a statement, the women participated in foreign training programs and used their reporting to incite protests against Amini’s funeral. “Both were the first sources for foreign media to fabricated this news,” the statement said.
The CHRI said the statement was “full of baseless claims”, including a false allegation that Hami had published a picture of Amini on Twitter that had gone viral.
“This witch hunt is a cowardly attempt by the Islamic Republic to record its many failures on two women journalists, diverting attention from the country’s organic and repressive policies that have given rise to a growing protest movement,” said Hadi Ghaimi, executive director of CHRI.
“The Islamic Republic hopes that the world will turn its attention away from the deadly repression of protests so that it can kill, maim, detain and defame innocent people like these women,” Ghaemi said.
(with inputs from AFP)
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