Jina Mahsa Amini (b. September 21, 1999, Saqqez, Kurdistan Province, Iran - d. September 16, 2022, Tehran, Iran), an Iranian women's rights martyr.
On September 16, 2022, the 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina Amini, died in a hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances. The Guidance Patrol, the religious morality police of Iran's government, arrested Amini for allegedly not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran stated that she had a heart attack at a police station, collapsed, and fell into a coma before being transferred to a hospital. However, eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with Amini, reported that she was severely beaten and that she died as a result of police brutality, which was denied by the Iranian authorities. The assertions of police brutality, in addition to leaked medical scans, led some observers to believe Amini had a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke due to head injuries received after her arrest.
Amini's death resulted in a series of protests described by CNN as more widespread than the protests in 2009, 2017, and 2019, and by The New York Times as the largest Iranian protests since at least 2009. Some female demonstrators removed their hijab or publicly cut their hair as acts of protest. Iran Human Rights reported that by December 2022 at least 476 people had been killed by security forces attacking protesters across the country. Amnesty International reported that Iranian security forces had, in some cases, fired into groups with live ammunition and had in other cases killed protesters by beating them with batons.
Mahsa Amini was born on September 21, 1999, to a Kurdish family in Saqqez, Kurdistan Province, in northwestern Iran. While Mahsa was her official Persian given name, her Kurdish name was Jina, and this was the name her family used., Her father is an employee in a government organization and her mother is a housewife. She attended Taleghani Girls' High School in Saqqez, graduating in 2018. At the time of her death, Amini had just been admitted to university, aiming to become a lawyer.
Amini's cousin, a left-wing political activist belonging to the Komala party and a Peshmerga fighter living in self-exile in Iraqi Kurdistan, was the first member of Amini's family to speak to the media after her death. He debunked claims by the Iranian government that Amini was involved in any politics. Instead, Amini has been described as having been a "shy, reserved resident" of her hometown who avoided politics, was never politically active as a teenager, and was not an activist. Amini's family have described her as having no prior health conditions, and as being a healthy 22-year-old, contrasting the claims made by the Iranian government that she possessed prior health conditions.
Amini had come to Tehran to visit her brother and, on September 13, 2022, was arrested by the Guidance Patrol at the entry of the Shahid Haghani Expressway in Tehran while in the company of her family. She was then transferred to the custody of Moral Security. Her brother, who was with her when she was arrested, was told she would be taken to the detention center to undergo a "briefing class" and released an hour later. Her brother was later informed his sister had a heart attack and a brain seizure at the police station to which she had been taken. Two hours after her arrest, she was taken to Kasra Hospital.
According to Amini's cousin, she was tortured and insulted in the van, as witnessed by her co-detainees. After she arrived at the police station, she began to lose vision and fainted. It took 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive, and an hour and a half for her to get to Kasra hospital.
For two days, Amini was in a coma in Kasra Hospital in Tehran. On September 16, journalist Niloofar Hamedi (who was also later arrested) broke the story of her coma, posting to Twitter a photo of Amini's father and grandmother crying and embracing in the hospital hallway. Amini died in the intensive care unit later that day.
An ongoing series of protests and civil unrest against the government of Iran began in Tehran on September 16, 2022, as a reaction to the death of Amini that day following police custody, after she was arrested by the Guidance Patrol for wearing an "improper" hijab — in violation of Iran's mandatory hijab law — while visiting Tehran from Saqqez. According to eyewitnesses, Amini was severely beaten by Guidance Patrol officers — an assertion denied by Iranian authorities.
The protests began hours after Amini's death, starting at the hospital in Tehran where she was treated and quickly spreading to other parts of the country, first to Amini's hometown of Saqqez and other cities in the Kurdistan Province, including Sanandaj, Divandarreh, Baneh, and Bijar. In response to these demonstrations, beginning around September 19 the Iranian government implemented regional shutdowns of Internet access. As protests grew, a widespread Internet blackout was imposed along with nationwide restrictions on social media.
In response to the protests, people held demonstrations in support of the government across several cities in Iran, in an attempt to counter the women's rights protests. The Iranian government has referred to these counter-protests as "spontaneous". The pro-government protesters called for the anti-government protesters to be executed, and have referred to them as "Israel's soldiers", whilst shouting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel", reflecting Iran's clerical rulers' usual narrative of putting the blame of the unrest on foreign countries. On October 3, in his first statement since the outbreak of the protests, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dismissed the widespread unrest as "riots", and likewise tried to cast the unrest as a foreign plot.
According to Iran Human Rights, as of October 8, 2022, at least 185 people had been killed as a result of the government's intervention in the protests, involving tear gas and live rounds, making the protests the deadliest since the 2019-2020 protests that resulted in more than 1,500 fatalities. The government's response to the protests was largely condemned, and the United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned the Guidance Patrol and several high-ranking Iranian officials.
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