Human rights activists say at least 500 were killed in the Islamic Republic’s bloody crackdown on nationwide protests sparked by the September 2022 death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, while she was in police custody for an alleged head-scarf violation.
But there are still victims we know nothing about, sometimes not even their names.
One of these little known victims of repression, Mohammad Hosseini, was killed by security forces on October 12 in Saqqez, the same city in Kurdistan province where Amini came from, according to information received by IranWire.
Pressure exerted by security agents forced his family to remain silent about the circumstances surrounding the man’s death. As a result of these pressures, her mother suffered a stroke and died on July 9.
Hosseini and his family lived in a rented place in the Saqqez neighborhood of University Town. He worked at a carwash as a daily wage-earner. When the nationwide protests erupted, he joined other young people in the streets to express his anger against injustice and discrimination and, like many other demonstrators, all he received was death.
His mother Maliheh Hassan-Nejad was put under surveillance right from the moment private mourning ceremonies for her son started. Security forces prevented the grieving mother from talking to the media, and the trauma caused by such inhuman treatment sent her to the hospital in a coma. She passed away there after seven months.
According to Hengaw, a Norway-based group that monitors rights violations in Iran's Kurdish regions, Mohammad Hosseini died after an anti-riot vehicle ran over his body twice.
The group reported that a female officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ (IRGC) Intelligence Organization was tasked with monitoring Maliheh Hassan-Nejad during the funeral ceremony for her son and inside the family house. The security forces had control over the woman’s interactions and did not allow her to have conversations with anyone.
Mohammad Hosseini must now be added to the long list of victims from Saqqez, alongside Mahsa Amini, Daniel Paibandi, who was a child, Fereydoon Faraji and Fereydoon Mahmoudzadeh. They were all buried in the cemetery of Aychi village.
The silence imposed on the grieving families is tantamount to psychological torture and raises the following question: How many protesters killed by the security forces of the Islamic Republic remain unknown because their relatives are forced into a painful silence?
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