Who she is
الهه محمدی (Elahe Mohammadi), born 1987, is an Iranian reporter for the reformist daily هممیهن (Ham-Mihan). She had ten years of experience covering social affairs when, on 17 September 2022, she drove west to Saqqez in Kurdistan province to cover Mahsa Amini’s funeral. Her dispatch documented the moment mourners pulled off their headscarves at Mahsa’s graveside, the moment that lit the entire country.
What happened
On 29 September 2022, twelve days after she filed her funeral report, Mohammadi was arrested. She was held in Evin’s Section 209 in solitary confinement for extended periods. The state’s charges: “collaboration with the hostile government of the United States,” “assembly and collusion against national security,” and “propaganda against the system.” The collaboration charge was, in 2024, quietly dropped on appeal; the state never produced any evidence connecting her work to a US handler. In October 2023 a Revolutionary Court sentenced her to 12 years across the remaining counts. The story she filed from Saqqez, the only thing the state could actually point to as her “crime”, was a piece of journalism about a funeral that the entire country could already see on its phones.
What followed
Released on €400,000 bail on 14 January 2024 alongside Hamedi. Pardoned 11 February 2025 in the same Supreme Leader amnesty list. While imprisoned she was awarded UNESCO’s Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize (2023) jointly with Hamedi and Narges Mohammadi. On her release in 2024 she did not give media interviews; her byline returned to Ham-Mihan after the pardon.
How she’s remembered
Mohammadi’s Saqqez funeral dispatch is studied in journalism schools in the diaspora as the textbook case of how local-language reporting from a small western Iranian town outpaced and shaped global coverage of the uprising. The pairing of “Hamedi at the hospital, Mohammadi at the grave” became shorthand inside Iran for the two ends of the story the state tried to bury. Diaspora press-freedom collectives in Berlin, Paris, and London held vigil readings of her courtroom statements during her imprisonment.
Cross-links
See Mahsa Amini, Niloofar Hamedi, zan-zendegi-âzâdi, jin-jiyân-âzâdi, Evin Prison, Saqqez.
Sources
- IFJ (13 Feb 2025): pardon announcement covering Mohammadi, Hamedi, Nakhaei
- Reuters (22 Oct 2023): Revolutionary Court sentencing
- UNESCO (2 May 2023): World Press Freedom Prize laureates
- Amnesty International (Nov 2022): “Iran: Two journalists held in solitary confinement”
- The New Arab / dpa (12 Feb 2025): pardon coverage
References
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