A 22-year-old student has been found dead more than a week after she disappeared in Iran.
Short-haired Donya Farhadi went missing from her home in Ahvaz on the evening of 7th December.
Locals found the architecture student’s body in the Karun River near the village of Muzaffaria on Thursday evening (15th December).
On the day of her disappearance, she had left home to go to class at the Islamic Azad University Ahvaz Branch.
After class, she had gone to meet a friend at Kabuli Bridge.
Witnesses later told how they had seen a young woman throwing herself off the bridge on the night in question.
However, Donya’s cousin called their accounts “contradictory” and “lacking credibility”.
No CCTV cameras are present at the location of the alleged suicide.
Dissidents in the Islamic Republic have called Donya’s death suspicious because it is the second such case in less than a week.
The two deaths coincide with the mass arrests and kidnappings of university students around the country.
Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran had announced the “suicide” of its student Shahabuddin Hashemi just days earlier.
But Shahabuddin’s brother said it was “murder” and called the university’s statement “full of lies and slander”.
Protests broke out in Iran on 16th September following the fatal beating of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by morality police for wearing her hijab “improperly”.
At least 458 people have been killed and 11 officially sentenced to death, according to independent estimates, while more than 18,200 are believed to have been detained.
