A new protest movement is gathering strength in Iran, driven by public outrage over the death of 19-year-old Amir Mohammad Khaleghi, an undergraduate business student at the University of Tehran who was robbed and killed near the dormitory last week.
Khaleghi was assaulted and stabbed Wednesday night and died of his injuries Thursday morning. The police described his attackers as “two motorcycle thieves.”
Students soon began protesting outside the dormitory complex, driven by anger that one of their number could be so easily and callously murdered on campus.
The protesters also questioned the official account of Khaleghi’s death, in part because it seemed so improbable that a random pair of thieves could commit a deadly crime on campus grounds. Questions were also raised about the religious aspect of Khaleghi’s murder, as he was a Sunni Muslim living in Shiite-dominated Iran.
A sit-in outside the University of Tehran dormitory on Friday was broken up by police and plainclothes security agents, who arrested four students and beat others with clubs.
This only enraged the student protesters further, prompting chants such as “IRGC, you are our murderer,” “the blood spilled cannot be erased,” “Death to the Islamic Republic,” and “Death to Khamenei.”
The IRGC is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the theocratic wing of the Iranian military, which often uses violence to suppress demonstrations against the regime. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the current Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
“The loss of a 19-year-old student is the tragic result of years of inaction and misplaced priorities,” said a statement from the National Student Guild Council, which blamed University of Tehran officials for creating unsafe conditions on campus.
Protests spread across Iran throughout the weekend, with students from other universities joining in. Dissident political leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi and Reza Pahlavi – son of the deposed Shah of Iran – offered their support.
Mohammadi condemned the Iranian regime for being careless with the lives of young people and turning universities into “prisons.” She likened the Khaleghi protests to the uprising after a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini was killed by Iran’s brutal “morality police” in 2022 for allegedly failing to wear her mandatory headscarf correctly. Mohammadi herself has been repeatedly jailed for defending the rights of women in Iran.
“Let’s not leave the protesting youth alone. Let’s amplify their voice of resistance. Let’s show that we stand together,” she said Friday.
“The killing of Amir Mohammad Khaleghi and the violence against protesting students at Tehran University’s dormitory once again demonstrated how incapable the Islamic Republic is in ensuring the security of the nation,” said Reza Pahlavi.
Protests continued on Monday. Observers noted the marching students have begun using chants from the Amini uprising, including, “If we don’t unite, we will be killed one by one.”
Iranian state media said on Sunday that three or four people have been “detained” in connection with Khaleghi’s death, but none of them has been formally accused of the murder yet.
“The security of the people is our red line. Any disruption to social or individual security will be dealt with decisively and in accordance with the law,” said a spokesman for the Iranian judiciary.
Other Iranian officials promised to fully investigate the case and bring the killers to justice, including President Masoud Pezeshkian. The Tehran Prosecutor’s Office announced that a special investigator has been assigned to Khaleghi’s murder.
On the other hand, Tehran police chief Sardar Abbas Ali and Mostafa Rostami, a representative of the Supreme Leader’s office, darkly hinted that “enemy influence” could be fueling the student protests. They claimed several agents of influence have been arrested while trying to infiltrate protest marches.
