Khamenei’s niece calls on nations to shun regime

Aniece of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ha has called on foreign eig governments to cut all links with Tehran’s h “murderous and child-killing” regime gi in a video posted online two days after af she was arrested. The video of a s statement by Farideh Moradkhani, a well-known rights

activist, has been e circulating online after it was shared re by her France-based brother Mahmoud m Moradkhani last Friday. Mahmoud hm said his sister had been arrested este after going to a prosecutor’s s office following a summons. F Farideh Moradkhani condemned the

“clear and obvious oppression” Iranians have been subjected to, and criticised the international community’s inaction. Moradkhani is an engineer who comes from a branch of Ayatollah Khamenei’s family that has a record of opposition to Iran’s clerical leadership, and has been jailed previously.

Iran has been shaken by more than 10 weeks of protests that have spread across the country after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested by the morality police for supposedly wearing her hijab inappropriately. The Iranian authorities said their inquiry showed she died from natural causes due to a pre-existing condition, but her family allege she was beaten.

The protests against the clerical establishment have grown into a broad movement to challenge the theocracy that has ruled Iran since 1979.

Last Sunday judicial authorities confirmed that the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, 38, who had expressed support for anti-regime protests, has been charged with “corruption on earth” and could face the death penalty.

Iran’s judiciary said more than 2,000 people have been charged since the start of the protests.

Salehi is among a number of prominent figures who have been detained. Iranian authorities said that Hossein Ronaghi, another prominent detainee, has been released on bail in a government act of reconciliation after Iran’s World Cup victory over Wales.

Ronaghi, who has been a human rights defender and advocate of a free Iran for nearly a decade, was arrested on 24 September at the start of the protests. He has spent a total of six years in prison since 2009 and recently had been suffering kidney problems inside jail.

It was also reported that a wellknown footballer, Voria Ghafouri, will be released. His arrest last week for allegedly insulting the national football team had provoked an outcry among fellow players.

Moradkhani is the daughter of Khamenei’s sister Badri, who fell out with her family in the 1980s and fled to Iraq at the peak of the war with Iran’s neighbour. She joined her husband, the dissident cleric Ali Tehrani.

She has gained prominence as an anti-death penalty activist and was last arrested in January this year. That arrest came after an October 2021 video conference in which she lavishly praised Farah Diba, the widow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was ousted by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency said last weekend that 450 protesters had been killed during more than two months of nationwide unrest, including 63 minors. It said 60 members of the security forces had been killed, and 18,173 protesters detained.

Speaking out “This regime is not loyal to any of its religious principles and does not know any law or rule except force and maintaining its power in any way possible,” said Farideh Moradkhani in a video. She complained that the sanctions imposed against the regime over its crackdown were “laughable” and said Iranians had been left “alone” in their fight for freedom. It was not clear when the video had been recorded.