Reyhaneh Jabbari was 19 years old when her life was cut short. She was studying computer science in Tehran and worked sporadically as an interior designer. It was 2007. That afternoon, fate would have it that she crossed paths with Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, supposedly a devoted family man and member of the Iranian Intelligence Service. The two met at an ice cream parlour in the capital. The man, who had overheard Jabbari talking, suggested that she redecorate his old office. She accepted and the next day she turned up at the address indicated. Thus begins the tragic story of the death of this young woman, told to Morning Express by her mother, Shole Pakravan, during a meeting of the Women’s Independence and Sustainable Equality (WISE) association in Barcelona. The meeting brought together around thirty Iranian activists, most of them exiled, on Monday, two years after the death of Yina Mahsa Amini. Amini was the young Kurdish woman who died after being beaten by the police after being arrested for wearing the obligatory veil incorrectly, according to the UN. Her death triggered the latest wave of protests against the Iranian regime.
In the distant year of 2007, Reyhaneh Jabbari went to that supposed professional appointment. Once in the house she was supposed to redecorate, “Sarbandi attacked her and started touching her. She broke free and managed to get to the door, but it was locked. Terrified, she grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threatened to stab him. He wouldn’t let her go, so she stabbed him in the shoulder. Then she ran away,” her mother explains, with great serenity.
The attacker died and the young woman was sentenced to death in 2009 for premeditated murder. The trial was not only riddled with falsehoods, her lawyer claimed, but also publicly staged the revenge of a conservative family of the Revolutionary Guard, the powerful Iranian parallel army, whose political clout is enormous and which also controls the country’s economy.
Like many judges in Iran, the one who tried Jabbari was a scholar of Islamic law, with no legal training. At the hearings, he told the defendant that she should have allowed her attacker to rape her and then reported him. “Did you not consider that Mr. Sarbandi may have wanted to have a temporary marriage, which would have been perfectly legal? Why did you resist?”?”the mother paraphrases, quoting the judge. Temporary marriage is a practice permitted by Shiite Islam, the majority in Iran, in which a man can marry a woman for a certain period of time, even for hours, have sexual relations with her and then break the bond. “As you can see, in Iran, if you defend yourself from rape, you are sentenced to prison,” laments the young woman’s mother.
The Supreme Court’s final death sentence in 2010 included arguments such as the “decent clothing” of the harasser’s daughters and the “religious beard” worn by the eldest son during the trial. “With this family, it does not seem possible to affirm that Mr. Sarbandi could have attacked the accused.”, the sentence states.
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During the seven years Jabbari spent in Evin prison in Tehran, she devoted herself to helping the other inmates, most of whom were members of the most vulnerable strata of society. Drug addicts and prostitutes. Women who had never had a home. “She underwent a transformation. She was no longer the same. She lived with women whom she helped. She understood them. And one day, the notification came,” explains her mother. “Under the law, Sarbandi’s family could decide to hang Rayhaneh or pardon her if she agreed to retract her statement. If she said she had lied, they would pardon her. If not, they would hang her themselves.” [la ley iraní permite a los familiares de una víctima de asesinato participar en la ejecución]”I ran to the prison to tell him the news,” recalls this mother.

Her daughter then said to her: “Mom, how do you expect me to say that I lied? How can you ask me to do that? He was a rapist! If I do that, what will happen to all the women who are raped every day in this country? I hope that one day no other woman will have to defend herself against rape.” Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed on 25 October 2014 in Gohardasht prison. Her trial can be followed in the documentary Seven winters in Tehranwhich won an award at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival. Iran is the country that executes the most women in the world. So far this year, of the 433 people hanged in Iran, 15 were women, according to data from the Iranian human rights organization in exile Iran Human Rights. That organization and others, such as Amnesty International, accuse Iran of using the death penalty as a mechanism of social control aimed at terrorizing the population.
Flight
Kousar Eftekhari has been living in Berlin for nine months, where she fled after months of threats for posting images of her mutilated face on social media. After the death of Yina Mahsa Amini, the 25-year-old joined the protests that broke out across the country. These were not the first. “Ever since I was very young, I hated my government because it did not allow me to be free. When I grew up, I joined the different demonstrations that were organised in the capital, hoping to change something,” she explains. Eftekhari began to denounce “injustices” by doing political theatre.
“When they killed Mahsa [Amini]the country changed. I had never seen anything like it. The streets had been full for four weeks and I was there. We had reached the University of Tehran. It was surrounded by police and everyone was shouting. [el lema de las protestas] Woman, Life, Freedom. So, I took off my veil. There was an officer right in front of me, close enough to hear. He said, ‘Put the veil on or I’ll shoot you in the face.’ I had been shot before in the chest and genitals. My body was in pain, but I couldn’t move and I didn’t want to put the veil on. Not this time. And he shot me in the face. In a second, I lost consciousness. I felt my eye explode from the inside. I fell to the ground and I don’t remember anything else,” she recalls.
The Iranian regime responded to these protests with repression. At least 551 people were killed by security forces and paramilitaries, 60,000 were arrested and nine young people hanged, according to the UN fact-finding mission. Dozens of people were left, like this young woman, mutilated. Human rights organisations have described a systematic pattern of shooting in the face, chest or genitals, aimed at killing or disfiguring unveiled Iranian women. Amnesty also documented numerous cases of sexual violence aimed at “crush protests”.
Eftekhari spent three weeks in hospital and emerged with the eyelids of her right eye sewn shut. She returned to protests and made her new image go viral on social media. She was then threatened with acid if she did not delete her face from the internet. She was banned from returning to university and from theatre. She was socially isolated. “Before all that, I had been arrested eight times by the morality police. They kicked me, hit me in the chest and dug their nails into my body. In Tehran, the abuse was constant. So when Mahsa was killed, I knew that nothing could stop me,” she says. In 2023, she was sentenced to four years in prison. She entered the fearsome Evin prison, where Jabbari had spent her last seven winters, but on leave to attend a court hearing, she managed to escape. “I travelled alone to Kurdistan, crossed the mountains into Iraq and managed to reach Berlin. Today, when I look in the mirror, I see a strong woman.” I would do it again, because I am a living example of the state terrorism perpetrated by the Iranian regime.”