Footage showing the aftermath of the alleged attack by Iranian morality police on a teenage girl in a Tehran metro station. Photo: Screenshot

A 16-year-old Iranian girl is lying in a coma after she was allegedly assaulted at a metro station in Tehran by agents of the regime’s feared morality police.

Armita Garawand was spotted on Sunday morning in the Iranian capital’s Shohada metro station apparently wearing her hijab, or head covering, inappropriately. The Islamic republic’s strict dress rules for women require they wear a hijab.

Garawand was arrested and beaten and is now languishing in Tehran’s Fajr Hospital, the human rights organization Hengaw reported on Tuesday.

According to Hengaw, Garawand is being guarded closely, with visits from family and friends forbidden. One journalist who attempted to see her — Maryam Lotfi of the Shargh news outlet — was herself detained before being released after several hours in custody.

Official media outlets claimed that Garawand had fainted as a result of low blood pressure. Her father, Bahman, was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying: “We have checked all the videos and it has been proven for us that this incident was an accident. We request people to pray for our child’s recovery.”

The attack on Garawand came as Iranians continue to commemorate the death of Jina “Mahsa” Amini, a young Kurdish woman who became an international cause célèbre following her death in a Tehran hospital on Sept. 16, 2022. Amini had been arrested and savagely beaten by officers of the morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab inappropriately. As news of her death spread, furious anti-government protests broke out in the Kurdish region where Amini was born and across the country.

The Iranian authorities insisted Amini suffered from a neurological disorder that led her to collapse inside a police station. Her family never accepted the explanation for her subsequent death in a coma, and said they had been denied the right to choose the doctor to conduct a postmortem examination.

News of the assault on Garawand was initially circulated by a London-based Iranian journalist, Farzad Seifikaran, who stated on social media that the teen and her friends were stopped by police for allegedly not wearing headscarves. Seifikaran reported that as police pushed Garawand down, she hit her head and fell unconscious.