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The Iranian journalist Niloufar Hamedi specialised in overlaying ladies’s points. So when her editor observed an Instagram put up a few younger lady in a hospital in unhealthy form after being arrested for violating the nation’s strict Islamic costume code, Ms. Hamedi headed straight there.
She discovered kinfolk of the girl, Mahsa Amini, 22, holding one another tightly in a fluorescent-lit ward inside Tehran’s Kasra Hospital. She snapped an image and posted it on Twitter — after which it went viral. That was Sept. 16, the day Ms. Amini died.
Antigovernment protests quickly unfold round Iran, igniting chants of “ladies, life, freedom,” they usually shook the nation for a lot of months. However Ms. Hamedi, 30, was not there to witness it: She had been arrested days after Ms. Amini’s demise.
Per week later, Elaheh Mohammadi, 36 — a journalist who had traveled to Ms. Amini’s hometown, Saghez, to report on her funeral — was additionally imprisoned. After spending greater than eight months in custody, each journalists went on trial final week, charged with conspiring with international intelligence businesses to undermine nationwide safety.
“They’re each lively and fervour, they usually have been preventing with their journalism to enhance ladies’s lives and standing in Iran,” stated Amir Hossein, a Tehran-based journalist. “As a substitute of investigating the causes and the individuals behind Mahsa Amini’s demise,” he added, “the regime started blaming the journalists who introduced it to gentle within the first place.”
“What can I say?” Mr. Hossein stated. “That’s the fact of journalism in Iran.”
The protests, which lasted for months, have lengthy since fizzled, dispelled by a violent authorities crackdown that killed a minimum of 573 individuals, in keeping with human rights teams. However for a lot of of these concerned, an official reckoning goes on: The authorities have executed seven protesters, and a minimum of eight extra are on demise row. At the least 95 journalists have been arrested, in keeping with the Committee to Shield Journalists.
Ms. Hamedi and Ms. Mohammadi have received widespread sympathy and acclaim within the West, even touchdown a spot in Time journal’s 100 most influential individuals this yr.
“We hardly ever hear the main points” of the abuses of Iranian residents by the authorities, the quotation learn. Due to their reporting, it added, “This time was completely different.”
Again house, nevertheless, Iranian officers made the prosecution of the 2 ladies a excessive precedence.
A joint assertion by Iran’s highly effective Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence after their arrests accused them of inciting individuals to protest, claiming that they have been brokers of enemy international locations skilled to publish inflammatory reviews on Ms. Amini’s demise to impress chaos.
Iran’s supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, known as the assertion “vital.”
Closed-door trials started for each ladies final month in revolutionary courts, which the federal government makes use of to prosecute delicate security-related instances. Little data has emerged from the proceedings, however Ms. Hamedi’s husband, Mohamad Hossein Ajorlou, and a lawyer for Ms. Mohammadi have stated that the journalists’ legal professionals have been barred from talking of their protection.
Mr. Ajorlou, who can be a journalist, stated no relations have been allowed to attend.
Ms. Hamedi denied the accusations in opposition to her within the first trial session, saying she had merely carried out her job as a journalist, her husband stated on Twitter.
Greater than 500 Iranian journalists have signed a petition calling on the courtroom to respect the ladies’s authorized rights. However many have been afraid to talk to The New York Instances about their case, and the few who did requested to be recognized by solely their first names out of concern about authorities repercussions.
“These two journalists have grow to be icons {of professional} journalism in Iran within the face of all of the restrictions and the censorship,” stated Asal, 31, a former reporter for the each day newspaper Shargh, which Ms. Hamedi labored for. “Their imprisonment isn’t just the imprisonment of two journalists, however the imprisonment {of professional} journalism in Iran.”
Each reporters had spent years getting ready for a second like Ms. Amini’s demise.
Ms. Hamedi, who was born within the northern Iranian metropolis of Babolsar and had a grasp’s diploma in bodily training, first labored as a sports activities reporter. That led her to articles about Iran’s ban on ladies in sports activities stadiums, which, in line with the federal government’s inflexible insistence on preserving ladies’s modesty, prevented feminine followers from watching soccer and different sports activities in individual.
She developed an urge for food, and a expertise, for articles on ladies’s rights.
One examined the discrimination, restrictions and home violence that had performed an element in driving some Iranian ladies to set themselves on fireplace. One other delved into Iran’s underground marketplace for unlawful abortions and the dangers ladies confronted to get them.
Ms. Mohammadi, a local of the town of Shahin Shahr in central Iran, majored in Persian literature as an undergraduate and earned a grasp’s diploma in gender research. As a journalist for newspapers and information web sites, she traveled to a few of the remotest components of the nation, interviewing ladies about their experiences.
Her best-known work described sexual harassment and violence in opposition to ladies.
Lately, held in Gharchak-Varamin jail, the ladies have little to do however knot bracelets of colourful thread for family and friends.
Ms. Mohammadi has misplaced greater than 20 kilos whereas in detention, in keeping with Instagram posts by her sister Elnaz Mohammadi, however has stored her spirits up.
In accordance with a fellow inmate, Ms. Hamedi retains busy with yoga, meditation and operating, an exercise she used to do along with her husband.
In January, Mr. Ajorlou tweeted {a photograph} of his spouse smiling over a pan of do-it-yourself pizza, together with a recording of a name she had constituted of jail. She was studying him a diary entry, as she usually did, this one about baking a cheesecake for her fellow inmates.
“Right here,” she stated, “within the jail of Gharchak-Varamin, life nonetheless finds its approach to us.”
In March, her husband wrote that he had run a marathon in her honor.
“Niloufar believes that enduring jail is like coaching for a marathon,” he said. “Every day struggling. However imagining the enjoyment of the end line cancels out all of the ache.”
5 months into his spouse’s imprisonment, Mr. Ajorlou posted a letter of dismissal he stated he had acquired from IRNA, an Iranian state-owned information company, after 13 years of working there. The letter, in keeping with a screenshot, stated that the company not wanted his companies.
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