Repeatedly imprisoned in his country, Kianoosh Sanjari refused to be silenced by the government. But in the end, despairing of change, he silenced himself.
The Iranian government first arrested him when he was a teenager protesting a crackdown on student activists. He remained undeterred.
For two decades, the regime repeatedly threw him into jail and detained him in psychiatric institutions, but the more Iran tried to silence him, the more outspoken Kianoosh Sanjari became. A tall, lanky man known for his dark suits and striped ties, he recounted the horrors he had experienced in interviews and videos posted on his social media accounts.
“The Islamic Republic ruined the days of my youth, as it did to millions of others,” Mr. Sanjari, a well-known journalist and human rights activist, once said. “Days that could have been filled with passion, happiness and sweetness were spent in prison, doing irreversible damage to my body and soul.”
Last Wednesday, Mr. Sanjari plummeted from a commercial building in central Tehran, hours after declaring that he would take his own life as a final act of protest if the government did not release four political prisoners by the evening. He was 42.
News of his death has shaken Iranians, with many saying it was the long years of government-inflicted trauma that ultimately led to his end. Many were especially rattled by the manner in which Mr. Sanjari’s death unfolded in public view, and in real time, as he posted a series of increasingly alarming messages on social media over the two days before it happened.
Amid the outcry, Iranians have been wrestling with subjects seldom discussed openly in the country: the effects of long-term trauma on political prisoners; the invisible mental health suffering of activists who may not reach out for help; and whether their country has adequate measures in place for people who threaten suicide.
“I would like to say that the Islamic Republic is directly responsible for Kianoosh’s death,” one longtime friend and fellow activist, Kourosh Sehati, said in an interview from London. “He wanted the regime gone; he wanted the release of the political prisoners.”
Some Iranian journalists pointed out that the authorities closely monitor the social media activity of activists and typically mobilize immediately to stop any public display of dissent. “Couldn’t security forces take an active role in preventing his death by any means?” one journalist, Amir Hossein Mosalla, wrote in an opinion essay.
Dr. Ali Nikjoo, a psychiatrist in Tehran, said in an interview that in Iran a suicidal person could be admitted to the hospital against his or her own will only if the immediate family obtained a court order. That can take days or weeks. The website of Iran’s Welfare Organization offers general guidelines for emergency crews and medical workers that call for transferring people to the hospital and not leaving them unattended if they show signs of mental distress.
Judge Mohammad Shahriari, the chief prosecutor for Tehran’s criminal court, said in a video interview with Iranian news media that the judiciary had opened a criminal case regarding Mr. Sanjari’s death.
Mr. Sanjari’s brother Majid, reached by phone, said he was “too distraught to speak.”
Kianoosh Sanjari started blogging and attending protests when he was in high school. He was arrested at age 17, placed in an adult prison and held in solitary confinement. He escaped Iran in 2007 after serving a two-year sentence in Evin prison on charges of “threatening national security.”
He arrived in the United States in 2008 by way of Norway and received political asylum. From 2008 to 2016, he worked as a journalist for the Voice of America Persian news service and as a researcher for several Iranian-focused human rights organizations. A photograph shows him delivering a speech outside U.N. headquarters the year he arrived in the United States, holding up a sign depicting the faces of people executed by the Iranian government.
Among the organizations Mr. Sanjari worked for was the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, which is based in Washington and documents human rights violations in Iran. Its executive director, Roya Boroumand, described him as an inspiring figure who, despite his own suffering, “remained active, fighting for the rights of other prisoners and against the death penalty.”
“Kianoosh is yet another young person from our homeland whose death is the responsibility of the Islamic Republic,” said Ms. Boroumand.
