Iran is prosecuting a woman who removed her headscarf and threw it on the ground at a public engineers meeting for “disrespecting” the religious garment, as the regime continues its crackdown on dissent.

Video footage posted online over the weekend showed the moment that the woman discarded the headscarf and then left the stage, as a mostly male audience looked on.

According to the Iranian news agency Tasnim, the unidentified woman is now being prosecuted over what appears to be an act of defiance linked to ongoing, mass protests against the regime.

“Legal proceedings have been launched against a woman who disrespected her headscarf during the election for the Tehran branch of the Iran Construction Engineering Organisation,” the news agency reported.

“It was falsely claimed that this individual was disqualified (from the branch election) for not wearing the headscarf,” the Tasnim report added, without giving any further details.

The Iranian regime, which forces women to wear headscarves under its interpretation of Islam, has grappled with months of mass protests seeking to bring down its ultra-conservative leadership.

Those protests started in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, while in the custody of Iran’s morality police, who had detained her for incorrectly wearing a hijab.

Since then, hundreds if not thousands of protesters have filmed themselves burning head scarves or cutting off their hair in protest at the religious law.

More than 500 protesters have been killed and 20,000 people have been detained in the protests, which in recent weeks appear to have started subsiding in scale.

Four protesters have been hanged in what human rights groups have described as kangaroo courts where defendants sometimes have just 15 minutes to defend themselves.
Iran on brink of becoming nuclear power

It comes as Western officials urgently sought confirmation of an alarming report on Sunday evening which said that Iran was now just short of the threshold of uranium enrichment required to develop a nuclear weapon.

If confirmed, it would mean that Iran is on the brink of becoming a nuclear power, in what would be a major crisis for Western allies even as they grapple with the Iranian-backed Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The report by Bloomberg, which cited two diplomatic sources, said UN nuclear inspectors had found levels of 84 per cent enriched uranium during an inspection of Iranian nuclear sites, just six per cent short of the bomb threshold and the highest level recorded so far.

Iran, which insists it is not building nuclear weapons, has denied the report and claims that the highly enriched levels of uranium were produced inadvertently.

Also on Monday, the British Government summoned Iran’s envoy due to threats against the broadcaster Iran International. The London-based network has suspended its UK operations due to threats against its staff by the Iranian regime.

Source » msn