آیدا رستمی

Who she was

آیدا رستمی (Âydâ Rostami), born around 1986, was an Iranian physician working in Tehran. She was around 36 years old when she died. Trained in general medicine, she had been part of an informal network of medical professionals quietly providing emergency care to protesters injured during the 2022 Woman-Life-Freedom uprising. The network existed because Iranian hospitals had been ordered, from the first days of the protests, to report gunshot wounds and pellet injuries to security forces, leading to documented arrests of injured protesters from hospital beds.

What happened

Aida had treated injured protesters in private apartments, basement clinics, and underground safe houses across Tehran for nearly three months. On the evening of 11 December 2022 she was reported missing by her family. On 12 December 2022 her body was returned to her family from a Tehran morgue. Her face was battered. According to her brother’s public statement and accounts collected by colleagues, one of her eyes was missing, her nose was broken, and there were marks consistent with beating across her body. The Tehran prosecutor’s office stated she had died in a road traffic accident. Her family was reportedly pressured to bury her quickly and not speak to media. Several Iranian medical colleagues, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International disputed the state’s account. They concluded, on the basis of the injury pattern and the timing, that she had been killed in connection with her medical work for protesters.

What followed

No independent investigation was permitted. The state’s traffic-accident framing was repeated through Mizan and IRNA without supporting forensic detail being released. Her brother gave several interviews to Persian-language outlets abroad before going silent under pressure. Multiple Iranian doctors abroad have since published professional testimonies attesting to the safe-house medical network and to Aida’s role in it. The case became, alongside Mahsa Amini and Nika Shakarami, one of the most-cited examples in international submissions to the UN Fact-Finding Mission of state retaliation against medical professionals.

How she’s remembered

Aida is remembered in the Iranian medical diaspora as a figure of professional ethics in extremis. Doctors Without Borders affiliates and Iranian-American medical associations have held memorial events on the anniversary of her death. Her photograph (a smiling young woman in graduation robes) is one of the recurring portraits in 16th-of-the-month diaspora vigils. Inside Iran, doctors who continued underground emergency care after her death described her as the breaking point that radicalized the medical underground network.

Cross-links

See Mahsa Amini, Nika Shakarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh, zan-zendegi-âzâdi, sepâh (IRGC), Etelâ’ât (MOIS).

Sources

• Human Rights Watch (Dec 2022): statements on the death of Aida Rostami
• Amnesty International (Dec 2022 / Jan 2023): briefings on retaliation against medical professionals
• Iran Wire (Dec 2022): “Doctor Aida Rostami’s mysterious death”
• Iran Human Rights Documentation Center: case file
• BBC Persian (Dec 2022): family statements and colleagues’ accounts

References

• Dehkhoda Lexicon
• Iran Wire (Dec 2022)
• BBC Persian on the case
• Amnesty briefing (Jan 2023)
• Iran Human Rights Documentation Center