Military News Today

Roya Heshmati, 33yrs old was arrested and punished for violating public morals by refusing to wear a hijab by being subjected to 74 lashings with a leather whip and ordered to pay the equivalent of £255 fine.

Heshmati has taken to her social media which is now locked down explaining how she was barbarically punished in what she described as a ‘medieval torture chamber’.

Heshmati explained how she was beaten mercilessly across her back, legs and buttocks, but still refused to wear a hijab in the courtroom even after the ordeal. 

‘The lashing was over. We left the room. I didn’t let them think I had experienced pain… We went up to the judge in charge of execution of the sentence. The female agent walked behind me and was careful not to let my headscarf drop from my head.

‘I threw off my scarf at the courtroom entrance. The woman asked me to wear the headscarf. I didn’t stop and she pulled it over my head again,’ she wrote.

The barbaric punishment has been condemned across social media, with Abbas Abdi, one of Iran’s leading journalists and social activists writing: ‘These lashes did not just come down on the body of one woman, they hit all those who dream of a life with normal freedoms alongside each other.

‘Enough is enough. Don’t disgust the society any more than this.’

‘The convicted, Roya Heshmati, encouraged permissiveness (by appearing) disgracefully in busy public places in Tehran,’ the judiciary’s Mizan Online website said late on Saturday.

‘Her penalty of 74 strokes of the lash was carried out in accordance with the law and with sharia,’ and ‘for violating public morals,’ Mizan said.

The judiciary also claimed Heshmati had connections to ‘an organised group outside Iran’, though didn’t specify details. 

Even after suffering the savage beating, Heshmati refused to wear a headscarf provided for her by officials, Iran International reported.

All women in Iran have been required by law to cover their neck and head since shortly after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Protests in Iran have increased since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22yr old Iranian Kurd, who died in custody after her arrest for allegedly breaching the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women and has led to more and more punishments such as whipping.

Kurdish-focused rights group Hengaw identified Heshmati as 33yr old woman of Kurdish origins.

She was arrested in April ‘for publishing a photo on social media without wearing a headscarf,’ her lawyer Maziar Tatai told the reformist Shargh daily.

Heshmati was also ordered to pay a fine of 12 million rials approximately £225 for ‘not wearing the Muslim veil in public’, Tatai said.

A prison sentence was initially put forward, but was later dropped.  

As part of their enforcement of the dress code, officials have installed surveillance cameras in public places to monitor violations and have shut businesses that breached the rules. 

Iran’s parliament has also discussed a bill that would toughen penalties for those breaching the dress code.

Heshmati’s ordeal came just months after Iran sent a popular rapper back to jail – less that two weeks after his release from prison on bail – for rapping about the hijab protests that followed Mahsa Amini’s death in custody in 2022.