The Iranian judiciary announced the sentences in the cases against journalists Elaheh Mohammadi and Nilufar Hamedi, who were among the first media workers in Iran to report on the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini in Tehran on 16 September 2022.

Branch 15 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court ruled that the two journalists were found guilty of three separate crimes.

Elahe Mohammadi was sentenced to 6 years in prison for “collaboration with the enemy state of the U.S.”; to 5 years for “plot to endanger national security”, and to 1 year for “propaganda against the state”.

 Nilufar Hamedi was sentenced to 7 years in prison for “collaboration with the enemy state of the U.S.”; to 5 years for “conspiracy against national security” and to 1 year for “propaganda against the state”.

The two journalists were also banned from membership in political parties, organisations and associations for up to two years.

Background

Jina Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police on 13 September 2022 on one of Tehran’s streets for wearing her hijab “inappropriately”.

Less than two hours after being taken to the Morality Police building on Vozara Street in Tehran, she was taken to Kasra Hospital in an unconscious state due to the severity of the blows to her head inflicted by the officers.

According to published reports, Amini was brain-dead when she was hospitalised. She died three days later, on 16 September, at Kasra Hospital in Tehran.

Although the Islamic Republic, as usual, announced Amini’s cause of death as “a heart attack caused by an underlying illness”, her family rejected this claim, insisting that their child was perfectly healthy before her arrest.

Several eyewitnesses among the detainees in the same van that took Amini to a detention centre, later confirmed that police officers used violence and beat the young woman severely, fracturing her skull.