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Iranwire – The family of an Iranian doctor who was tortured and killed by Iranian security forces for treating injured protesters are under pressure to appear on state TV to say she died after falling from a bridge, IranWire has learned.
Aida Rostami, 36, was treating protesters in Tehran until she disappeared earlier this week. Her tortured body was handed over to her family a day later.
The family was instructed to give an interview before state TV cameras on December 17 to deny that Rostami was the victim of security forces and say their loved one fell from a bridge, a source close to the family said.
The source said that the relatives decided not to appear on TV and are now facing pressure from the authorities.
Iranians wounded by the security forces during the ongoing nationwide protests avoid treatment in the country’s increasingly unsafe hospitals for fear of being detained, tortured, prosecuted or killed.
Rostami was one of the courageous medics ready to brave risks to treat protesters in their offices, the demonstrators’ homes or elsewhere.
The doctor disappeared on December 12 after leaving a protester’s house to fetch medical supplies.
A local police station called the family the next morning, announcing she had died in a car crash overnight. They were told to pick up her body at a morgue.
“The medical examiner told her family that they were ordered not to reveal the true cause of Aida’s death. They said that she did not die in a car accident, they killed her,” a source told IranWire.
Mizan news agency, which is affiliated with the judiciary, claimed Rostami was thrown from a bridge near Tehran’s Azadi Square by “a man she was in a relationship with.”
Iranian authorities routinely extract confessions from political prisoners or their family members by force, which are then broadcast for propaganda purposes.
