A Compassionate Nurse
Maedeh Javanfar, a 28-year-old nurse, was born in Ramsar, a coastal city in northern Iran. In 2012, with top-ranking scores on Iran’s national university entrance exams, she entered the School of Nursing at Gilan University. After her studies, she worked in a hospital in Rasht, the capital of Gilan province.
Maedeh was deeply dedicated to nursing and had worked in the profession for eight years. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, despite low wages, she took on multiple shifts and tirelessly cared for patients with an unwavering commitment.
On the evening of Tuesday, October 25, 2022, protests surged in the streets of Rasht. Security forces were firing into the crowds. Suddenly, a young man nearby was struck by a bullet and collapsed to the ground. Maedeh, compassionate and brave, rushed to aid him. Yet, before she could reach the injured man, Basij militia and Revolutionary Guards attacked her, brutally punching her in the face. The blows were so severe that Maedeh lost her life on the spot.
Security forces took Maedeh’s lifeless body with them. At 10 a.m. the following morning, they called her family, claiming that Maedeh had died in a traffic accident on the Tehran-Rasht highway. They instructed the family to retrieve her body from the city of Qazvin. When her family arrived, they saw her face was uninjured, but her eyes bore deep bruising from repeated blows.
The forensic report stated that Maedeh died due to head trauma. Security agents only allowed her family to take her body on the condition that they would report she had died in a car accident.
On Friday, October 28, 2022, when the family arrived for Maedeh’s burial, security forces were already present. They prevented the family from performing funeral prayers, saying, “We’ve already done that ourselves.” Quickly, before any crowds could gather, they buried her quietly in the Behesht-e Zeinabiyeh cemetery in Ramsar, under strict surveillance.
