LYON: Journalists witnessed a gathering of approximately 1,000 people on Sunday in the French city of Lyon in support of unprecedented anti-regime protests in Iran.
Carrying a banner that read “Woman, life, freedom,” the protesters walked through the streets of the eastern city while chanting the protest slogan.
Following the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Amini’s death in custody on September 16, demonstrations began in Iran.
She had been taken into custody by morality police, who strictly enforce a dress code that requires women to cover their necks and hair with a scarf.
The clerics face their greatest challenge since the 1979 revolution toppled the shah as a result of the protests’ escalation into demands for an end to the Islamic regime.
Hundreds of people have been killed as a result of the authorities’ violent response.
The judiciary reports that thousands of people have been arrested and 14 people have been given the death penalty, many of them for killing or attacking members of the security force. Four people have been killed, two of them on Saturday.
Many of the protesters in France on Sunday had ties to the country personally.
Sholeh Golrokhi, 49, stated, “I am here to demand freedom in Iran.” My entire family was detained when I was a young child. Samane Ramezanpanah, 35, stated, “We are here to ask Western countries to be the voice of our people” and “expel Iranian ambassadors.”
A 38-year-old Iranian man drowned in the Rhone River, which runs through Lyon, at the end of December. He posted on social media that he was going to kill himself to raise awareness of Iran’s crackdown on protesters.
