The Poe-esque Mystery of Kheirabad and Its Aftershocks
An underage Iranian has reportedly kidnapped and molested an underage Afghan girl, stabbed her to death and thrown acid over the body to get rid of it.
Setayesh Ghoreishi, a six-year-old Afghan refugee who lived with her family in Kheirabad, a suburban district of Varamin southeast of Tehran, went missing last week after she left home to buy ice-cream from a local shop but she never came back home. It took the police two days to find Setayesh’s dead body abandoned on a neighboring rooftop. The suspect currently under police custody is a seventeen-year-old Iranian boy. The Ghoreishi family have told Vaghaye Daily that the juvenile murderer was barely seventeen and a top student at school. Copies of his photo, installed in the neighborhood captioned as “top student” were secretly removed overnight after the incident, Mahtab Joudaki writes for Vaghaye Daily. Sina Ghanbarpour’s observations reported on Khabar Online seem to be in contrast. The dean of the school Omid (pseudonym for the suspect) went to has denied any disciplinary issues with him while labeling his educational status as unsuitable.
Neighbors, activists, the governor of Varamin, the Afghan ambassador to Tehran and other provincial authorities have visited the Ghoreishis to express condolences and promise legal pursuit. Several lawyers have also offered help in the case.
For more than a decade, over two million Afghans immigrants have been living in Iran but the Iranian public’s attitude has been discriminatory in several cases. Afghan immigrants still face strict red-tape for marriage with Iranian women and some parks have on different occasions banned Afghans. Criminal offences committed by Afghans, including group rape and murder, immediately go viral, sometimes leading to sentiments that end up with severe battering of Afghan nationals across Iran. Despite cultural similarities between the two nations, Afghans seem to have failed to fully acculturate in their new home while many Iranians still find them a burden for their country’s struggling economy as refugees have occupied low-paid labor opportunities while millions of Iranians are out of work. Official ties between the two governments have constantly flourished in recent years so much so that Iran hosts many sports occasions on behalf of Afghanistan. Even the Supreme Leader has emphasized the Afghan refugees’ right to education which is again subject to mostly illegal tuition fees and bureaucratic obstacles.
However, Iranian official media’s hesitation in immediately covering the story has been interpreted by Afghan commentators as one of the root causes of such incidents. Afghan MP Ahmad Behzad published a statement last week in which he slammed Iranian media. “A murder is a murder and it makes no difference what nationality the offenders are; what is most annoying here is the semi-apartheid approach used by the host country’s media. If it was the other way around in which the murderer had the identity of his victim, would the repercussions of the murder be the same silence and negligence?” Ensaf News quoted from the statement. While the note calls for the separation of the murderer and his society, it partly blames the dominant policy in host media for ‘hate mongering’ against Afghan refugees. Afghan journalist Seyyed Jamaleddin Sajjadi wrote a similar note, slamming Iranian media while expressing hope the incident could change the mind-set of many Iranians.
The reports of the Kheirabad mystery were kept confidential, as the Iranian law mandates in investigations concerning underage culprits, until Friday when word of the news hit social media and became instantly viral, prompting heated debates among users. A small minority advocate turning a blind eye to the catastrophe on the grounds that Iran has seen, in retrospect, similar stories where Afghan immigrants assaulted and or killed Iranian citizens while a campaign called “I am Setayesh” is launched to show support and sympathy for her family and demand legal persecution. The campaigners are using the hashtag IamSetayesh to call for an evening gathering here on Monday in front of the Afghan embassy in Tehran to light candles and mourn for Setayesh.
The whole Setayesh episode has come during European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini’s visit to Iran with human rights one of the main issues on her agenda. Iran’s Human Rights Chief Mohammad Javad Larijani stressed in a meeting with EU’s Mogherini that Tehran is ready to negotiate on human rights. “Imposition of sanctions against the Islamic Republic’s individuals and institutions on the pretext of human rights violations is an unjustified, shameful measure”.
Iranian social media users are also individually promoting the rights of Afghan immigrants and condemning hate-spreading remarks with whatever strategies come to their minds. “A dog mattered to him [or her], but the rape and murder of an Afghan girl did not,” wrote a frustrated Twitter user. Another tweet reads, “I do not understand this talk of Iranian nation, Afghan nation … Never could imagine Afghans as foreigners or people different from us”.
The sentiments for or against Afghans living in Iran will ebb away sooner or later but the real challenge is for the Iranian judicial system to impartially and indiscriminately handle the case, to prove Iran’s hospitality to the refugees.