A woman has been left with gruesome injuries after she was whipped 74 times for ‘violating public morals’ for refusing to wear a hijab while walking through the streets of Tehran.
Roya Heshmati, 33, was lashed with a leather whip and also forced to pay a fine equivalent to £255 fine after she ‘encouraged permissiveness’ by walking around in public without covering her head.
Writing on her social media page, Heshmati explained how she was beaten mercilessly across her back, legs, and buttocks in a dank room she likened to a medieval torture chamber.
‘[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 brutal punishment triggered widespread outcry on 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.
