A 23-year-old student was shot in the head “from close range” during the anti-government protests in Iran, a human rights group has said.
Robina Aminian attended Shariati College in Tehran, where she studied textile and fashion design. She was killed on Thursday after joining a protest after leaving the college, according to the Norway-based Iran Human Rights group.
“Sources close to Robina’s family, citing eyewitnesses, told Iran Human Rights that the young Kurdish woman from Marivan was shot from close range from behind, with the bullet striking her head,” the group said in a statement. Her family travelled from their home in Kermanshah to Tehran to identify her body among “the bodies of hundreds of young people”.
The group quoted a source close to the family as saying that after much struggle, the family retrieved her body and returned to Kermanshah, but intelligence forces had surrounded their home and they were not allowed to bury her. The family was “forced to bury her body along the road” between Kermanshah and nearby Kamyaran.
Aminian’s uncle, Nezar Minouei, told CNN that she was “a strong girl, a courageous girl” who “fought for things she knew were right” and was “thirsty for freedom, thirsty for women’s rights, her rights”.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency estimated that at least 538 people have been killed in the violence surrounding the demonstrations, including 490 protesters, with more than 10,600 arrested.
