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The Iranian teenage girl who collapsed and fell into a coma after boarding a Tehran metro train without a headscarf has died.
“Extensive medical treatments” were unsuccessful and Armita Geravand died 28 days after being admitted to intensive care, Iran’s state news agency IRNA reported. Last week, local media had confirmed that the 16-year-old girl was brain-dead.
Geravand collapsed on a train on October 1 on her way to school. CCTV footage showed her friends dragging her limp body off the train a few seconds after boarding.
The official medical account stated that Geravand “suffered a sudden drop in blood pressure, collapsed, underwent a brain injury that resulted in seizures, cerebral hypoxia and oedema”, IRNA reported.
But Hengaw, a human rights group based outside Iran, claimed she had been “physically attacked” by “hijab guardians” over her refusal to wear a headscarf.
Masoud Dorosti, Tehran metro’s managing director, has rejected reports of any physical confrontation, saying she had hit her head after fainting.
The incident stoked fears of another wave of social unrest in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini.
Amini was taken into custody outside a Tehran metro station for allegedly breaching hijab rules in September 2022. She collapsed at the morality police station and died in hospital three days later.
Her demise triggered anti-government protests that led to hundreds of deaths. Iranian officials insisted she had died of a heart attack and accused foreign provocateurs of spreading false reports that she had been beaten.
Since the protests, many Iranian women have refused to cover their hair in public. Officials have largely ignored the breaches, but there have been reports of occasional clashes between women with uncovered hair and religious conservatives.
Hijab enforcers have in recent months been stationed on the Tehran metro to confront women not wearing the hijab.
In September, Iran’s parliament passed a contentious bill that proposed harsh penalties for women defying the mandatory hijab law.
But this week, the country’s Guardian Council, which vets legislation, refused to endorse the bill and returned it to parliament over “ambiguities” in the text.
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