Uncovering the truth: The killing of Mahsa Amini
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini died after being arrested by the Iranian morality police for allegedly dressing inappropriately, sparking protests across the country and beyond. But six months on, there are two opposing narratives of what happened to the 22-year-old: the official account and what her family says. Our correspondent has been investigating to provide the most comprehensive account yet of her final days.
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Guest: Louise Callaghan, Middle East Correspondent, The Sunday Times.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Sharla Ivers, the political correspondent at Times Radio and a columnist for the Sunday Times. |
| 0:05.8 | Every day I'm searching for the humour in the comings and goings of our political masters, |
| 0:10.7 | and hopefully trying to hold them to account along the way. I wouldn't be able to do this without |
| 0:14.8 | the subscribers to the Times and the Sunday Times. Subscribe today and only pay £1 for three months. |
| 0:20.9 | Visit the Times.co.uk forward slash podcast offer, Terms and Conditions Apply. |
| 0:30.9 | It's a really, really strange story actually, so I was in Istanbul where I live, |
| 0:36.0 | and I was looking for Iranians who had escaped. I met this guy, Sajjad Khorakami, |
| 0:43.5 | who is an amazing journalist. We got talking and he mentioned that he was the guy who had broken |
| 0:50.3 | the story about Masa Armini's detention, and that he was still in contact with and had a lot |
| 0:58.5 | of detail about exactly what had happened around her death. So I said let's work together. |
| 1:06.4 | That story began in September last year, when Sajjad Khorakami, an Iranian journalist who'd |
| 1:12.0 | recently left the country, saw a post on social media about a woman who'd been brought to a hospital |
| 1:17.2 | in the capital Tehran. From that, he realised. There's something happening here. A woman's been |
| 1:23.6 | taken into the hospital. She'd been her, she'd collapsed while she was under the care of the |
| 1:29.1 | Iranian morality police after she'd been arrested. So he tries as hard as he can verify the |
| 1:34.8 | details of what's happening, but the regime really, really quickly starts denying that anything's |
| 1:39.3 | happened and then all these journalists are trying to figure out exactly what's happening, |
| 1:43.8 | but it's all really, really chaotic at this stage. |
| 1:48.6 | So Sajjad then realises that this is really important and he calls a friend to go and |
| 1:53.3 | check on it. He speaks to Masha's brother, Kiara, she was there and then puts Sajjad in touch with them. |
| 2:01.7 | Sajjad then started posting on Twitter about what had happened and then the news started |
| 2:07.1 | filtering out. Street protests in Iran over the death of a woman in custody. |
... |
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