Students’ Lives Are Held Cheap: Basir Ebrahimpour’s Case

Basir Ebrahimpour, a mechanical engineering student at Tehran’s Amir Kabir University, died after suffering a heart attack on the university campus on May 31.

According to the Telegram channel of the university students, the university’s emergency services were immediately informed about the incident, but no immediate action was taken, and it took 45 minutes for an ambulance from outside to arrive at the scene.

The rescue team failed to save Ebrahimpour’s life, the report added.

Describing Ebrahimpour as a "hard-working and talented student," the board of directors of Amir Kabir University stated that the student "had a cardiac arrest due to a history of heart problems."

The statement also claimed that the university’s emergency service intervened "on time" but the "efforts by doctors and rescue operations" were unsuccessful in saving his life.

In a statement on June 3, the National Council of Students’ Unions announced that "perhaps if the emergency department had taken care of this student in the first few minutes, Basir Ebrahimpour would have been alive now.”

“The president and the board of the directors of Amir Kabir University, who themselves are among the main culprits of this student's death, shamelessly expressed their regret in a statement and tried to trivialize Basir Ebrahimpour’s death,” it added.

According to the statement, before Ebrahimpour’s death, students had several times warned university officials about the dismal state of the university’s emergency services, “but the health of students has never been” a priority for the university’s administration.

The statement pointed out that Amir Kabir University and other universities have spent large amounts of money to suppress students’ protests. It cited the installation of surveillance cameras across the university and the multiplication of patrols by security forces while “a little of this budget has been used for students and students’ lives."

The death of students on university campuses due to the negligence of university administrators and emergency crews is not new. Such negligence recently led to the death of a student in sports sciences at Zanjan University.

This student, named Mohadeseh Bakhtiari, died after sustaining serious injuries in a car collision inside the university last month.

In its statement, the student’s council warned that "with the deployment of autocratic administrators in universities as an arm of repression and with the weakening of students’ unions as a uniting and systematizing institution for student’s demands," the lives and the health of students are at the risk of further incidents.

On June 2, the newspaper Etemad reported on the suspicious death of the 32-year-old Zahra Jalilian, a PhD student at Tehran University’s Faculty of Engineering who had received a prestigious scholarship from Germany.

Seven months after her death while nationwide protests were in full swing, her family and lawyer told Etemad that the university declared the cause of death as a “suicide,” without any proof.

"Even though the building has 13 surveillance cameras, the security department has never shown us any footage," they said.

According to the report, Jalilian had said two days before her death, “I have discovered something that would win the Nobel Prize in Physics. I’m afraid that if somebody learns about it, they would steal it from me by force or would do something to me.”

At 10:30 a.m. on December 2, 2022, an ambulance took Jalilian from her office to Tehran’s Shariati Hospital, where she died a few hours later. Tehran University officials claimed, without providing any evidence, that she committed suicide due to differences with her professor over the publication of one of her articles.

After examining the evidence surrounding her death and the severe damage to her body, Jalilian's family believe she was murdered.