Outspoken Iranian activist sews lips shut, stages silent sit-in

One of Iran's most vocal dissidents outside of prison is trying a new tack: sewing his lips shut and staging a silent protest at one of Tehran's busiest intersections.

Alone and defiant with one fist in the air in the middle of a busy intersection in Tehran, prominent Iranian dissident and blogger Hossein Ronaghi held a sit-in protest that briefly landed him in jail, according to his mother who spoke to Iran International.

Ronaghi had posted a photo of himself with his lips sewn shut on Saturday.

“Perhaps this will be a wake-up call … Long live Iran.”

Ronaghi was repeating the final words of his friend Kianoosh Sanjari, a journalist and activist who took his own life last week to protest the imprisonment of fellow dissidents.

Ronaghi has since been released from prison.

Videos posted to social media show Ronaghi protesting on Monday in the busy Valiasr junction as cars, motorbikes and pedestrians cross by without seemingly making any reaction.

Ronaghi’s mother Zoleikha Mousavi told Iran International that the street was filled with plainclothes officers, most of them women.

Some officers also allegedly attacked Mousavi, but after her shouting and protests, they let her go.

She told Iran International exclusively that an ambulance sped towards her son, but said she intervened to stop it. Several agents later took Ronaghi away in what she described as a violent arrest.

On Telegram, Ronaghi’s account posted that he was arrested in the early evening at the intersection by several armed officers and that after several hours of detention he was dropped off in front of his home by the same officers.

Ronaghi also announced that he would appear before a Revolutionary Court in Tehran with his sewn lips in another form of resistance.

The gesture would be protest, he said, “against the occupiers of this land, against poverty, against executions, against the oppression of women and imprisonment of the people, and against every form of injustice imposed on this country by the Islamic Republic," he wrote on X.