Mina Sheikhi
مینا شیخی
2019 · 7 years ago
- Taken
- 16 November 2019
- Age
- 59 years old
- From
- Tehran, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Mina Sheikhi, Dadeh Mina to her family, was a Kurd from Saqqez, the second child of a well-known political family; two of her brothers had been executed by the regime. When her mother died, the care of her younger brothers and sisters fell to her. She married in 1978 or 1979 and had four sons and two daughters, and after her husband died in a car accident about ten years later she raised all six alone and never remarried.
She loved travel, mountains, open plains and nature. People close to her remember a joyful, fearless, playful woman who always had a smile on her face. She had moved to Tehran because that was where her children worked.
How the regime took them
On the evening of 16 November 2019 Mina was cooking while protests filled the streets around her building in Tehran's Khalij-e Fars neighbourhood. She went up to the roof, where about 20 neighbours were warning protesters about the special forces, and shouted down at the forces beating people: why are you beating somebody's child?
Around 9 pm she put her hand to her chest and called for her children. They thought it was a heart attack; she had been shot three times in the chest, apparently from another rooftop, and witnesses believe she was singled out for her Kurdish dress. She died at Fayazbakhsh Hospital. Security forces had her buried in Saqqez at 3 am, in a plot they chose. Her age is given as 59 by the Boroumand Center and 58 by Amnesty International.
