“You are a heroine”. Elnaz Rekabi, the Iranian athlete who competed without the headscarf challenging the Islamic Republic, was greeted with applause and slogans by a crowd of over a thousand people who gathered at around 4 am at Tehran airport. The 30-year-old climber was returning with her teammates from the Asian Championships in South Korea, where she participated in the final without the hijab, which has been compulsory in public since 1979 in ayatollahs’ Iran.
“I was called to compete when I didn’t expect it, I found myself entangled in my technical equipment. That’s why I didn’t pay attention to the veil I should have worn”, the athlete told the press in an interview at the airport. , appearing in front of the cameras, in fact, still without the veil but covering his head with a baseball cap and the hood of the black sweatshirt he was wearing. “I returned to Iran in peace, in perfect health and according to the planned schedule. I apologize to the Iranian people for the tensions that have arisen,” said the sportswoman, adding that she had “no intention of leaving the national team” .
According to Iranian activists and users on social media, Rekabi was forced by the Iranian authorities to make these statements. She traces a message from her yesterday on her Instagram, where she said that the hijab had fallen “inadvertently”, after they had lost track of her.
According to the websites of dissident Iranian journalists abroad, while it was not clear where she was, the sportswoman was taken to the Tehran embassy in Seoul while the images of her competing without a veil went around the world. A gesture interpreted as support for the protests underway for over a month in Iran for Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish woman who died after being arrested by the moral police because she did not wear the veil correctly.
The harsh repression by the Tehran regime against protesters has resulted in at least 240 deaths and 8,000 arrests in a month, according to human rights NGOs. The criticisms of the West, and the sanctions decided by the European Union in protest against the reaction to the demonstrations, were branded as “interference in internal affairs” by the officials of the Islamic Republic and today Tehran announced its response. Four institutions and 15 Western officials who helped impose sanctions against Iran will end up on the Islamic Republic’s list of terrorist organizations, Tehran Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian announced.
