A Brave Girl Who Paid the Price for Freedom
Kiana Atashzar was born in Tehran, Iran on September 5, 2007. Known for her courage and passion, she had told her friends, “Everything has a price.”
On October 9, 2022, after school, Kiana Atashzar and her friends joined ongoing protests in the Haft-Hoz area of Narmak, a neighborhood in Tehran’s eastern region. During the brutal crackdown on demonstrators by Iran’s security forces, Kiana was violently attacked. Officers beat her repeatedly, delivering blow after blow with batons until she lost her life.
Following her death, security forces took her body and held it for two days, leaving her family in the dark about her fate. When her body was finally returned, her eyes had been sewn shut, and her organs had been removed.
Government agents intimidated her family and ordered them to claim that Kiana had fallen into a well. When her father questioned this story, asking why her eyes were sewn shut, he was told, “We conducted an autopsy and donated her organs. If you protest, your family could suffer similar consequences.”
Responding calmly, Kiana’s father said, “We have no objections, but the one who cast our child into the well will fall into it themselves.”
Kiana Atashzar was laid to rest in Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, Section 258, Row 189, Grave 1.
