The name of Mona Heydari feeds the long list of victims of "honor killings" in Iran.
The 17-year-old woman was beheaded on Saturday by her husband in Ahvaz, capital of a province in the south-west of the country, according to the Iranian news agency Rokna.
An unbearable video, published on YouTube, puts images on the horror of these non-penalized murders in the Islamic republic: we see a man parading in the streets of Ahvaz, smiling, holding his head at arm's length of Mona Heydari in one hand, and a large knife in the other.
See the beautiful smile of Mona heydari a 17 yr old girl who was beheaded by her husband yesterday.
She was a victim of forced marriage at the age of 12 & she had a 3 yr old boy.
This is how living under sharia laws looks like in Iran.
My heart is broken#LetUsTalk@FSeifikaran https://t.co/JhABwJgG67 pic.twitter.com/Hj0qHU9DnG
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 6, 2022
Mona Heydari leaves behind a toddler son.
Married by force to her cousin, Sajjad Heydari, at only 15 years old, the teenager was the victim of domestic violence, according to the Women's Committee NCRI, a committee for the defense of Iranian women.
"Each time she asked for a divorce, her family persuaded her to return home and continue to live with her husband for the sake of her child," the organization reports.
Escape to Turkey
The young woman had fled six months in Turkey, before returning.
Her father and uncle then find her and promise her a safe life.
Alone and helpless, the young woman allows herself to be persuaded.
The promise will never be kept.
On her return, Mona is murdered by her husband and his brother.
According to Iranian journalist Farzad Seifikaran, who quotes a source close to the family, the teenager would have met a Syrian refugee in Turkey via Instagram.
A pretext that would have justified the "honour crime" in the eyes of his murderer.
Sajjad Heydari and his brother are under arrest, pending legal proceedings.
Their condemnation is far from obvious.
Because the country authorizes a father, a brother or an uncle to kill in all legality an unfaithful wife or a homosexual child to “wash” the honor of the family.
These crimes are more widespread in rural areas, frozen in an archaic patriarchal structure.
In a few specific cases, the law provides for a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
At least 8,000 honor killings in four years
In an article published in October 2020, the medical journal The Lancet lists at least 8,000 victims of these so-called "honour crimes" committed in Iran between 2010 and 2014. Some of them were under the age of fifteen, others barely ten years.
A figure that is undoubtedly greatly underestimated: the perpetrators of these murders are not brought to justice, because most families do not file a complaint.
The review points out that Article 630 of Iran's Penal Code allows a man to kill his wife and her lover if he witnesses sexual intercourse, provided he is certain of his wife's consent.
Article 301 also stipulates that the father and grandfather of the woman killed must not carry out reprisals in this context.
“In the absence of a system of legal protection for women who have children and wives living in conditions of domestic violence, homicides are repeated and covered as exceptional crimes, explains Farzad Seifikaran, now based in the Netherlands. Low.
However, these crimes are rooted in legal, political and cultural inequalities that facilitate the commission of gender-based crimes and make it difficult to prosecute and combat these crimes.
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