Her name was Jina. Mahsâ was the legal name on her national-ID card — the one the Islamic Republic forced her family to register because Kurdish names like Zhinâ are routinely refused at the office of vital records. Inside the family she was Jina, زنده “the living one.” She was 22 years old, five days short of her birthday, when she was killed in custody on 16 September 2022. She had been visiting her brother Kiarash in Tehran. She came as a tourist. She left in a coffin.
The sixteen hours
On the afternoon of 13 September 2022, around 5:30 pm local time, Jina and Kiarash exited Haghani metro station near Shahid Beheshti University in northern Tehran. Three officers of the Gasht-e Ershâd — the Guidance Patrol, Iran’s morality police — stopped her at the station entrance. The accusation was the standard one: improper hijab. Witnesses say her headscarf was loose. Witnesses say it was on. The state has never produced unedited footage of the arrest.
She was loaded into a green-and-white morality-police van and transferred to the Vozara detention center in central Tehran for a “re-education class” — the routine processing women picked up by the Guidance Patrol were subjected to. Kiarash, who tried to follow, was told to leave. He waited outside Vozara for two hours.
Inside the center, Jina collapsed. Witnesses inside the holding room — women detained alongside her — would later tell BBC Persian, IranWire, and human-rights monitors that officers had struck her on the head with a baton inside the van and again inside the building. The state’s narrative, repeated through Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB, was that she suffered a sudden cardiac event from a pre-existing heart condition. Her family — including her father Amjad, who had documented her medical history all her life — said she had no such condition.
She was rushed to Kasra Hospital in central Tehran, in a coma, oxygen mask and ventilator on. CT scans leaked by hospital staff to Iran International within days showed brain hemorrhage and skull fracture consistent with blunt-force trauma. She was kept on life support for sixty-two hours. Niloofar Hâmedi, a journalist for the reformist daily Sharq, photographed Jina’s parents holding each other in the hospital hallway. Hâmedi published the photograph and the death notice on her Twitter account on 16 September 2022. Within the hour, the photograph had reached every Persian-speaking timeline on earth. By morning it had reached the rest of the world.
The official cause of death, registered by the Tehran coroner’s office on 17 September: cardiac arrest. The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, in its report published in March 2024 (A/HRC/55/67), concluded after eighteen months of evidence-gathering and witness interviews that Jina Amini died “as a result of beatings by the State morality police” and that her death constituted a violation under international law. The Islamic Republic has refused to accept the finding.
The name they tried to erase
Iranian Kurds cannot register Kurdish names in their state IDs. Naming offices have a list — the Esami-ye Mojâz, “permitted names” — and Kurdish-language names like Zhinâ, Sirvân, or Birivân are routinely refused under a 2008 directive that requires names to “conform to Iranian national values.” Jina’s parents wanted to call her Zhinâ, the Kurdish word for life. The office of vital records told them no. They named her Mahsâ on the ID card and called her Jina at home. She was Jina to her family, Jina to her cousins, Jina on her gravestone in Saqqez. The state’s name was always the second name, not the first.
This is not a small detail. It is the architecture of the killing in miniature. The state had already spent twenty-two years overruling what her family wanted her to be called. On 13 September, it spent ninety more minutes deciding what she could wear. Both refusals are made of the same material.
Her gravestone in Aichi Cemetery, Saqqez, Kurdistan was inscribed by her family with the line: تو نمیمیری، نام تو یک رمز خواهد شد — “You will not die. Your name will become a code.” The state ordered the inscription removed. The family refused. The line is still there.
What followed
The funeral in Saqqez on 17 September 2022 was the first protest. Mourners chanted Jin, Jiyân, Azadî — the Kurdish slogan that means woman, life, freedom, lifted from the Kurdish women’s movement of Rojava and the PJAK and PKK women’s organizations across the border. The slogan had existed for over a decade. After Jina’s funeral, it became the slogan of an entire country.
By the second day the chant had crossed the language line. Tehran chanted زن، زندگی، آزادی — Persian for the same three words. Within a week the protests had spread to more than 150 cities in all 31 provinces. Universities walked out. High schools walked out. Women across Iran took off their headscarves in the street and in classrooms and burned them in public bonfires. Footage of these moments, smuggled out through VPN-bypass apps as the Islamic Republic shut down the internet, became the visual record of the uprising.
The state response was the response the state always gives. Sepâh-e Pâsdârân deployed alongside Basij paramilitaries. Live ammunition. Birdshot at face level — Iranian doctors who treated protesters during these months later documented hundreds of cases of permanent eye loss from deliberately aimed pellets. The internet was shut down nationwide for days at a time. Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp blocked. By February 2023, HRANA had documented at least 537 protesters killed, including 71 children. Iran Human Rights later raised the toll to 551 confirmed killed.
Some of the named dead, in this glossary, with their own pages:
- Nika Shakarami — 16 years old, last seen 20 September 2022 at a Tehran protest, body found nine days later. State narrative: suicide-by-jumping. UN FFM and family: severe head trauma consistent with baton strikes. Her mother was forced to bury her in secret in Khorramâbâd to prevent the state from staging a different burial.
- Sarina Esmailzadeh — 16 years old, Karaj. Died 23 September 2022. State: suicide-by-jumping. Family + Amnesty: blunt-force head trauma from batons.
- Aida Rostami — Tehran physician who treated injured protesters in safe houses (because hospitals were reporting gunshot wounds to police). Found dead 12 December 2022, body battered. State: traffic accident. HRW + colleagues: killed in custody.
The journalists who first told Jina’s story were arrested next. Niloofar Hâmedi — the Sharq photographer who took the hospital photo — was arrested on 22 September 2022. Elâhe Mohammadi of Ham-Mihan, who reported from the Saqqez funeral, was arrested on 29 September 2022. They were held in Evin Prison for seventeen months. Original sentences (October 2023) of thirteen and twelve years. Bailed in January 2024 at €400,000 each. Pardoned 11 February 2025.
The rapper Toomaj Salehi, whose songs about poverty and repression had been a soundtrack to the protests, was arrested 30 October 2022, tortured by his own account and per Amnesty, sentenced to death on a mohâreb charge in April 2024 — a sentence overturned by Iran’s Supreme Court in June 2024 after international pressure. Released 1 December 2024, after 753 days inside.
Where things stand now
It is May 2026. Jina is three years and eight months dead.
The Islamic Republic claimed in December 2022, through prosecutor-general Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, that the morality police had been “dissolved.” The claim was a lie. BBC Persian, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all confirmed the patrols had resumed openly by April 2023. In December 2024 the Iranian parliament passed the Hijab and Chastity Law, which expanded the morality apparatus and added prison sentences of up to ten years for women appearing in public without “proper” head covering. The law took effect, with workplace and university enforcement, in early 2025.
The European Union formally listed the IRGC on the EU terrorist list on 19 February 2026, four years after the killing. The United States had designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in April 2019. The United Kingdom and Canada had moved earlier. The Islamic Republic responded by listing the EU as a “supporter of terrorism” and the names rolled past each other on the diplomatic ticker.
None of this brings her back.
The 16th of every Iranian month, in the Iranian diaspora — Toronto, Berlin, Stockholm, Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Paris — there are vigils. They are quiet. People bring photographs of Jina and of the others — Nika, Sarina, Aida, Hadis Najafi, Elâhe Tavakolian, Mehrshâd Shahidi, Kian Pirfalak (10 years old, killed in Izeh on 16 November 2022 by Basij) — and they stand together for an hour. Most months it is freezing. Most months no one speaks. The point is to be there.
Inside Iran, the morality police still operate. The hijab law is enforced. The chant has not stopped.
Read more
- UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran — A/HRC/55/67 (March 2024)
- Amnesty International — initial reporting and verification
- Human Rights Watch — World Report 2024 Iran chapter
- Iran Human Rights — protest casualty database
- IranWire — diaspora-Iranian investigative journalism, English edition
- HRANA — Human Rights Activists News Agency
This page is a memorial. It carries no advertising, no newsletter sign-up, no monetization. Its purpose is to keep one name where it can be found. — Persian With El