The team that arrested Mahsa Amini: Captain Enayatollah Rafiei (up-left), Sergeant Ali Khoshnamvand (up-right), Fatemeh Ghorban-Hosseini (down-right) and Parastou Safari

Exclusive: Hackers Reveal Alleged Identities Of Amini's Arrest Team

Sunday, 10/02/2022

A hacking group has shared the alleged identities of the hijab police team that arrested Mahsa Amini, the woman whose death has sparked an uprising in Iran. 

Hacker group Backdoor (3ackd0or) provided Iran International with documents about the four police officers who stopped Mahsa along with a few of his relatives in Tehran and took her to the Vozara police station in a police van. According to reports, she suffered at least one severe blow to her head that led to her death in the following hours. 

Iran International has no knowledge of how they obtained this information, which cannot be independently verified.

The commander of the team was Captain Enayatollah Rafiei, 52 years old and from the town of Khodabandeh in northwestern Zanjan province.

Captain Enayatollah Rafiei

The other male agent of the team was identified as Sergeant Ali Khoshnamvand, 27 years old and from the village of (Khoshnamvand) Khushnamvand in the Kouhdashtdistrictof Lorestan province in western Iran.

Ali Khoshnamvand

Parastou Safari is 36 years old and was born in the eastern city of Kermanshah. She is probably the female agent who deemed Mahsa’s clothing “inappropriate” and decided to take her to the station for “a short training on Islamic dress code.”

Parastou Safari

Fatemeh Ghorban-Hosseini is 27 years old, the youngest of the team that arrested Mahsa and was born and raised in the capital Tehran.

Fatemeh Ghorban-Hosseini

The authorities first tried to spread disinformation that Mahsa Amini had an illness which caused her death, but soon information emerged that severe blows had broken her skull and caused a coma after two hours of her arrest.

Her death almost immediately led to protests in her home province of Kordestan in Western Iran and then spread to the capital Tehran and other cities. The government resorted to brutal force against demonstrators and so far at least 150 people have died, with the largest single-day toll on September 30 in the city of Zahedan where 42 local protesters were shot.

On Thursday, September 29, Mohammad-Bagher Bakhtiar, a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard during Iran's 1980-88 war with Iraq, published an audio file quoting informed sources at the Forensic Medicine Organization as saying that Amini died because of a "blow to her skull".

Iran International had earlier published Mahsa's skull CT scan which showed bone fracture, hemorrhage and brain edema. The medical documents and dozens of exclusive images sent to Iran International by a hacktivist group vividly show a skull fracture on the right side of her head caused by a severe trauma to the skull, which corroborate earlier accounts by her family and doctors about her being hit several times on the head, proving that the Iranian police's claim that she suffered a heart attack was untrue.

An eyewitness told Iran International last week that Mahsa had told her in a detention room that an officer had hit her on the head.


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