Actor Elnaaz Norouzi, who recently expressed her support to the ongoing anti-hijab protests in her native country Iran, has revealed that she too had an encounter with the infamous morality police in the country. Women in Iran have been marching to the streets after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police. The 22-year-old had been arrested her for allegedly breaching Iran’s strict dress code for women. Also Read| Elnaaz on crisis in Iran: Haven’t been able to talk to family
Elnaaz Norouzi took to her Instagram account on Tuesday to share a video in which she stripped herself semi-naked as a mark of protest. She started the video wearing a burqa, and proceeded to remove it and several more articles of clothing. She captioned it, “Every Woman, anywhere in the world, regardless of where she is from, should have the right to wear whatever she desires and when or wherever she desires to wear it.”
The actor opened up about her own experience with the morality police in a conversation with Siddharth Kannan. She recalled, “What happened to Mahsa Amini, that morality police captured her on the roads, this happened to me as well in Tehran. This happens to women every day. What happened to her could have happened to me as well, or can happen to any other woman tomorrow. So we need to change something.”
Elnaaz revealed that only her family knew about this incident until she opened up about it recently on her Instagram account. She also recalled how the morality police had taken her to an unknown location and shared how she managed to escape them.
She said, “I went to this ‘re-education centre,’ they call it so. I didn’t know where it was, I didn’t have the address. They take your phone. Mahsa must have resisted, and they must have hit her head so much that she went into a coma and died. (At re-education centre), They take all of your information, they take your ID. They take pictures of you like you are in a prison. They made me write my name, take pictures from all the angles in the clothes that you had on. Then they tell you ‘if we catch you again with the wrong type of clothing, it won’t be this easy.'”
Elnaaz shared that she was let go of prison in just one day because she played smart, and had two phones, but only gave them her German phone number. She updated her family with her Iranian phone number who took help from their contacts on the inside to take her out.
22-year-old Mahsa Amini was pronounced dead, days after the morality police detained her last month for not properly covering her hair with a hijab. She collapsed at a police station and died three days later, following which Iran has witnessed widespread protests across the country. Nearly a hundred people have died in the protests The country has also imposed a conditional ban on the internet, due to which Elnaaz is only able to talk to her family at night through just texts.