On Thursday, September 25, 2025, political prisoner Somayeh Rashidi, a 42-year-old garment worker and activist, died in Qarchak Prison after Iranian authorities systematically denied her medical treatment. Her death has sparked outrage among fellow prisoners and human rights defenders, who say she is the latest victim of the regime’s deliberate policy of medical neglect used as a weapon against dissent.
A number of prisoners, chanting slogans such as “Death to the dictator, death to Khamenei, damn Khomeini,” sang and cried out: “Somayeh is ill, yet she too has become a martyr.” Audio recordings from ceremonies in Qarchak and Evin prisons testify to the defiance of those who gathered to commemorate her.
Critical Condition of Political Prisoner Somayeh Rashidi; On the Verge of Death in Qarchak Prison
Arrest and Brutality
Somayeh Rashidi was arrested on April 28, 2025, after writing anti-government slogans in a poor neighborhood of southern Tehran. Relatives confirmed she was beaten savagely during her arrest, with officers slamming her head against a wall. This violence set the stage for her slow death inside prison walls.
Mizan, the regime’s judiciary news agency, reported that she had previously been arrested in 2022 and 2023 for alleged links to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI). After her conditional release, she was again accused of reestablishing contact with the PMOI before being detained in April 2025.
According to political prisoners’ testimony, she was also detained on May 2, 2025, after writing the slogan “The worker is awake and despises both mullahs and Shah.” Following 24 hours in an undisclosed detention center and psychological torture, she was transferred to the women’s ward of Evin Prison.
Health Condition Ignored
Somayeh had long suffered from epilepsy and was under medication for it. Inside Qarchak Prison, her condition worsened due to poor conditions and denial of medical care. Fellow inmates reported that she suffered repeated seizures and severe headaches, yet each time she sought help, prison staff accused her of “feigning illness” and sent her back to her ward.
The prison’s so-called doctor, Mirza Baqi, dismissed her symptoms as malingering and prescribed inappropriate neurological drugs unrelated to her condition. When she was finally transferred to a hospital on September 16 after a severe seizure, doctors found her in critical condition, with no chance of recovery.
Despite public warnings by the NCRI Women’s Committee on September 21 that her life was in imminent danger, authorities did nothing. Instead, regime media spread disinformation, claiming she was an addict or that her family had refused to post bail—allegations her cellmates say were lies meant to obscure the state’s responsibility.
State Propaganda and Denial
Following her death, the regime’s Basij-run Student News Agency (SNN) released a video of Somayeh chanting “Death to Khamenei, hail to Maryam Rajavi” in an apparent attempt to depict her as a collaborator with foreign enemies. The outlet further claimed she was using “illegal drugs,” suggesting her death was due to addiction. Political prisoners strongly rejected this narrative, insisting: “Somayeh and others like her are not condemned to death because of addiction, but because of their fighting spirit and refusal to submit, which makes them enemies in the eyes of these executioners.”
They added that the authorities’ smear campaign was designed to cover up the beatings, denial of medical treatment, and torture that ultimately killed her.
A Broader Pattern
Human rights advocates emphasize that Somayeh’s case is not an isolated tragedy but part of a systematic policy. Just days earlier, two other women—Jamileh Azizi on September 19 in Qarchak and Maryam Shahraki on September 12 in Fardis Prison—died after their medical emergencies were dismissed.
Somayeh’s death recalls decades of repression in Iran’s prisons, including the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988. Fellow inmates described her as a witness to “the killing of many innocent women and girls” in Qarchak and beyond. “Somayeh was neither the first nor will she be the last to be imprisoned and massacred in the prisons of this homeland,” they wrote.
Calls for Accountability
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) condemned her death as a state-sanctioned crime. In a statement, the group urged the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran, the Human Rights Council, and the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women to investigate and take “urgent action to save the lives of sick prisoners, especially women, in the Qarchak torture center.”
The NCRI stressed that the responsibility lies squarely with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his apparatus. “The blood of Somayeh Rashidi is on the hands of Ali Khamenei and the entire regime. They are directly responsible for this heinous crime.”
Legacy
For many Iranians, Somayeh’s story represents not only an individual tragedy but also the broader struggle for freedom and dignity under an oppressive regime.
Her death has become a rallying cry within Iran’s prisons and beyond. The prisoners’ commemoration, their chants of defiance, and their testimony underline that her fight lives on in those who continue to resist.
