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The suicide of 42-year-old dissident Kianush Sanjari on Wednesday has sent shockwaves through Iranian society, sparking outrage among many who hold the Islamic Republic directly responsible for his death.
In a tweet on Tuesday, the former political prisoner threatened to take his own life if authorities did not release four political prisoners he named by 7:00 pm the following day. Ahead of the deadline, he posted a photo from the top of a shopping complex in central Tehran and, in a subsequent post, expressed his determination to follow through with his decision.
“No one should be imprisoned for expressing their beliefs. My life will end after this tweet but let’s not forget that we die because of our love for life, not death. I hope that Iranians will awaken one day and overcome oppression,” he wrote.
Thousands tried to convince Sanjari in the comments to his tweets not to give up his life while some others mocked him and called him a coward for making what they said was only an empty threat.
Some activists claimed they attempted to contact him but received no response. Only two others reported visiting him at his home, bringing his therapist along to help prevent his suicide. They added that he later left with the therapist to continue their conversation.
Minutes after Sanjari’s last tweet, some activists announced in their X posts that he had jumped to his death from atop the building. Within minutes, two videos emerged on social media that showed a male victim on a wet pavement in central Tehran that showed a woman and a man performing CPR to revive him. The victim was quickly identified as Sanjari in X posts.
Discussion of Sanjari’s suicide has overtaken the Persian-language social media, with most users condemning the Islamic Republic for driving Sanjari to take his own life. Some others allege that he was directly “murdered” on Wednesday by security forces who are trying to cover up his killing.
Since 1999, when he was just seventeen, Sanjari was arrested nine times for his political activities and endured extended periods of solitary confinement in prison.
In 2019, he was transferred from prison to a psychiatric facility, where he later reported being repeatedly subjected to painful and debilitating electric shocks and injected with unknown substances.
His funeral will take place on Friday and a large turnout by mourners cannot be ruled out.
An official of Tehran Criminal Court, Mohammad Shahriari, told the media Thursday that the incident was being investigated as a suspicious death and that the police were reviewing CCTV footage from the building.
Shahriari also said that Sanjari’s unnamed therapist who was present at the scene told the authorities that she had spent time with Sanjari that day until a few minutes before the incident when he told her he had changed his mind about taking his life and parted ways.
According to Shahriari, the therapist became suspicious minutes later when Sanjari did not answer her call and returned to the compound to search for Sanjari with the help of the building’s security only to find that he had already jumped to his death.
The official’s account is very similar to the accounts of two former political prisoners, Hossein Ronaghi and Alieh Motalebzadeh, who say they visited Sanjari at his home on Wednesday and took his therapist with them.
The two activists have widely been accused of being implicated in the cover-up by other dissident activists. Their accusers claim that intelligence bodies used his account to post the tweets attributed to him to make his death, which they call “state murder”, look like suicide.
As proof, they have drawn attention to Sanjari’s body with light clothing and bare feet despite the rain in the two videos that have so far found their way to social media, the lack of visible blood spilling around the body in the said footage, and what they claim to be discrepancies in the accounts given by Ronaghi and Motalebzadeh.
These suspicions are rooted in the Iranian intelligence ministry’s record of “elimination” of tens of dissident politicians, intellectuals, and artists in Iran and abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. The killings came to be referred to by the media at the time as “chain murders of intellectuals”.
In an unprecedented move and on the insistence of then-president reformist Mohammad Khatami, the ministry admitted in a statement in January 1994 that its agents were responsible for four of the killings. The other suspicious deaths have remained unsolved since then.
