Iranian police have denied the arrest of singer Parastoo Ahmadi who challenged the Islamic Republic with a virtual concert in which she appears without a veil and sings in public. According to the police, the woman was only summoned and then left the police station with her family.
“After the production and publication of an out-of-the-ordinary video, Ms. Ahmadi was summoned by the public security police and told to turn to the judicial authorities,” the police of the northern province of Mazandaran announced in a statement. collected by the Tasnim agency.
Hours earlier, the artist’s lawyer Milad Panahipour had reported her arrest together with four musicians who had accompanied her in the virtual concert. The lawyer also said that the charges against the singer are not known, nor her whereabouts, nor who detained her.
The artist had published on YouTube on Wednesday a 27-minute video of a “hypothetical concert” held in a historic caravanserai, in which she appears in a long black dress, with bare shoulders and without a veil, defying the strict dress code and the ban on singing in public for women in Iran. The Iranian judicial system filed a lawsuit against the singer on Thursday for holding the concert “without permission” and without respecting “legal and religious norms.” Ahmadi had already faced legal problems when he released the song ‘From the blood of the youth of the fatherland’ during the protests sparked by the death of the young Mahsa Amini.