Khodanur Lojei was a Baluchi man killed during the Zahedan Bloody Friday massacre, the single deadliest event of the Mahsa Movement and a continuation of Iran's long history of state violence against the Baluchi minority.
On Friday 30 September 2022, after Friday prayers at the Makki Grand Mosque, security forces opened fire on the crowd. Khodanur was among the dead. The earlier video of him chained to a flagpole, while officers placed water just out of reach, had been one of the images that triggered Baluchi participation in the post-Mahsa wave. The UN Fact-Finding Mission documented at least 103 deaths in Zahedan in the weeks that followed.
The Zahedan massacre is the part of the 2022 uprising the regime most wants flattened out of memory. The killings happened at a mosque, not at a hijab protest, and the victims were Baluchi Sunnis whose deaths the central state has historically discounted. Naming Khodanur is naming a community.
He is the index entry for Zahedan Bloody Friday. The Persian glossary cannot pretend the protest archive ends at Tehran.
What it is
Khodanur Lojei (خدانور لجعی) was a 27-year-old Baluchi man killed by Iranian security forces in Zahedan, Sistan and Baluchestan province, on 30 September 2022, the day known in Persian as jom’eh-ye khunin-e zahedan (Bloody Friday of Zahedan). On that day security forces opened fire on worshippers leaving the Makki Grand Mosque after Friday prayers, killing more than 90 people according to Amnesty International. A video of Khodanur from earlier that year, in which he was chained to a flagpole in the sun by security forces with a water bottle placed just out of reach, had already gone viral across Iran. He had taken part in the protest carrying that memory.
Sources
- Amnesty International, Zahedan Bloody Friday report (December 2022)
- UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran (A/HRC/55/67, March 2024)
- Human Rights Watch, Zahedan investigation call (December 2022)
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