Iranian Lawyer Reveals Further Arrests In Police Brutality Case

In a rare instance, two police officers and two plainclothesmen in Iran have been detained in connection with the attempted murder of protester Pouria Alipour.

During the initial weeks of the Iranian people's uprising last year, a video surfaced showing one officer driving over Alipour with a motorcycle, while another fired at him from a distance of less than a meter in a suburb of Tehran.

It is a rare case to come to trial in the wake of protests in which over 500 civilians were killed and tens of thousands more rounded up and imprisoned by state security apparatus in the uprising following the death in morality police custody of Mahsa Amini, arrested for the inappropriate use of her hijab.

In an interview with Emtedad News, Alipour's lawyer, Payam Dorafshan, said, "The new allegations include intentional manslaughter, unauthorized shooting, intentional assault, and creating a hostile view towards armed forces, as determined by the military investigator."

The release of the video of Alipour's attempted murder in November 2022 stirred public outrage in Iran. Some social media users described the footage as the "Islamic Republic unfiltered," while others interpreted it as "street-level assassination of dissenters."

Since the beginning of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising, numerous reports of protesters being beaten and mistreated by the security forces of the Islamic Republic have surfaced including mass blinding and state-sanctioned sexual violence, according to Iran's Me Too movement reports.

In addition to the hundreds of citizens killed and thousands detained during the uprising, the families of the plaintiffs have also faced severe pressure from the Iranian government over the past year.