Iran's spiritual leader Khamenei regularly sees the instigators of the protests in Iran in the West. Now his niece is holding up the mirror to the Ayatollah. On YouTube, she calls the mullahs' regime "murderous." Farideh Moradchani is already in prison for this.
A niece of the religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been arrested in Iran, apparently because she had sharply criticized the leadership in Tehran. As Farideh Moradchani's brother, Mahmud Moradchani, wrote on Twitter over the weekend, his sister was arrested on Wednesday. In a video shared by her brother on YouTube, she described the Iranian leadership as a "murderous and child-killing regime".
Moradchani is the daughter of Khamenei's sister Badri, who fell out with her family in the 1980s and fled to Iraq. Her daughter, who has made a name for herself as an opponent of the death penalty, has been imprisoned several times in Iran.
In her most recent video, Farideh Moradchani also criticizes a lack of international reaction to the crackdown on the current protests in Iran. She called the sanctions imposed on Tehran "ridiculous" and complained that the Iranians were being left "alone" in their fight for freedom.
Iran has been shaken by a nationwide wave of protests since mid-September. The trigger was the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in police custody - she had been arrested by the vice squad because she is said to have worn her headscarf improperly. The authorities are taking action against the demonstrators with increasing severity. The UN human rights commissioner Volker Türk speaks of more than 300 dead and 14,000 arrests.
The Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, for example, faces the death penalty for criticizing the violent crackdown on the current protests in Iran. The indictment, in addition to "corruption on earth", accuses Salehi of being an "enemy of God", the justice portal "Misan Online" quoted the head of the judicial authority in Isfahan province, Assadollah Jaafari. The indictment was accordingly served on the court of the provincial capital of the same name.
