TEHRAN – With the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini only a few days away, an oppositionist doctor unveiled the truth about how a media lie was passed off as an unquestioned fact.

Last year this month, the young Iranian girl Mahsa Amini died in police custody. Her suspicious death opened the door wide open for wild speculations ranging from state killing to police brutality, which prompted Iranian officials at the highest echelons to open a probe into the incident. 

The investigation resulted in a coroner’s report indicating that Mahsa Amini suffered no blow to her head or other vital organs at the police station. The foreign-based Farsi-speaking media, however, pushed their own narrative about the Mahsa death, which centers around an alleged blow to her head resulting in brain injury. 

Iran International, a formerly London-based news television, went so far as to unveil CT scans of Mahsa’s head purportedly showing she suffered a blow to her skull. And then it gave countless airtime to “doctors” who reinforced its slanted narrative. 

A U.S.-based oppositionist doctor has refuted the long-held view that Mahsa Amini suffered a blow to her head that led to her death. An oppositionist Texas-based physician offered a glimpse into how Iran International disseminated a wrongful narrative about the death of Mahsa Amini. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Behrouz said the news channel reached out to him to comment on Mahsa Amini’s CT scans, which Iran International said showed a skull fracture and cerebral edema.  

The doctor, Reza Behrouz, said he saw the CT scans in question but found no skull fracture and damage to the brain. 

“The CT scans were normal. There was a dent in the right temporal bone which resembled former brain surgery scars. The only logical conclusion was that the photos belonged to another person and were sent to Iran International as belonging to Mahsa Amini,” Behrouz said.

He added, “At that time, we thought that the best decision is to refrain from speaking about the CT scans as we felt that doing so would harm the revolutionary movement.”

Facing an uproar among other oppositionists, the doctor was forced to delete the post. But he inadvertently revealed how immoral and biased the opposition was. 

This comes at a time when the opposition and their mouthpieces continue to level a myriad of accusations against the Islamic Republic. And they often accuse the Iranian government of lying to the public, hiding, or even worse fudging the truth about the cause of the death of Mahsa Amini. 

But it transpired that it was the opposition that employed extremely dishonest tools to deceive the Iranian youth into joining the unrest. 

A year later, they are doing the same in order to re-ignite the unrest despite the fact that the many lies of the opposition are now exposed. The foreign-based Iranian opposition is deeply fractured, but it’s not their divisions that make them extremely unreliable. It is their belief that they are free to use any tools, however immoral, in their struggle that continues to discredit them in the eyes of the Iranian people.