“Do not forget that we die for the love of life, not of death”, wrote Kianoosh Sanjari before throwing himself from the bridge dedicated to Hafez, the Great Iranian poet: a last, extreme, political gesture, the resistance of a body thrown into the void that he shouts to the world his right to dissent. Or at least that's how Sanjari, 42 years old, many of whom spent time in Iranian prisons, understood it, a journalist who had decided to dedicate himself to activism in defense of civil liberties and rights. He announced and reported his suicide live on Tuesday evening, demanding the release of four political prisoners, or death would come. His.
If “Fatemeh Sepehri, Nasrin Shakarami (the mother of Nika, the 16-year-old protester killed and who became a symbolic face of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, ed.), Toomaj Salehi and Arsham Rezaei are not released from prison by seven tomorrow and the news of their release will not be published on the judiciary news site, I will end my life in protest against the dictatorship of Khamenei and his associates,” he wrote on a new post on Wednesday: “It's 7pm, Hafez Bridge”. And the last message: “No one should be jailed for expressing their opinions. Protest is the right of every Iranian citizen. My life will end after this tweet Let's not forget that we die for the sake of life, not death. I hope that one day Iranians will wake up and defeat slavery.”
Two videos shared on social media show the body of a man lying on the ground under the Hafez bridge, two people trying to resuscitate him, in vain. Sanjari's death was confirmed by a relative on Radio Farda. The activist was born in Tehran, one of those kids for whom freedom cannot be negotiated: he had immediately joined the student movements, had been arrested several times and had finally decided to take a break, away from Iran, in Norway and then America. In Washington he had worked for a while with the US-funded opposition channel, Voice of America, but returned to Tehran in 2015 to be with his elderly mother. Arrested, again. Three years behind bars and then released, the story of many Iranian activists.
He spoke about that experience in an interview with Radio Farda, revealing that he had been forced to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital where he had undergone “nine times forced treatment with electric shocks and the injection of substances” whose nature he did not know. He had spoken about the practice of locking up political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals on other occasions, denouncing the dark fate that had befallen other prisoners. The news of his suicide shook the world of Iranian activism, of those who agreed with his positions and also of those who discussed and argued with Sanjari because he held more reformist positions, such as the journalist Hossein Yazdi, who was also imprisoned several times : “I feel suffocated, I didn't think you would do it, but I wish you would take me with you. I wish we hadn't argued,” he wrote on X.
