A Dissident’s Final Act of Protest Stuns Iran

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.

But exile also took a toll on Mr. Sanjari. He struggled financially, had episodes of depression and loneliness, and could not find permanent employment, according to two of his friends.

One of them, Omid Memarian, an Iranian expert on human rights, said Mr. Sanjari had decided to return to Iran to help take care of his mother when she became sick in 2016. He thought that the threats against him had eased with the passage of time and that he could find stability back home.

The opposite happened.

The authorities arrested him shortly after his arrival, and the Revolution Court, which prosecutes political cases, sentenced him to 11 years in prison after a hasty trial. He served five years, and during this period, the prison authorities transferred him to government psychiatric facilities at least six times.

Out of all of Mr. Sanjari’s activism, his resolve to expose the abuse he endured in the psychiatric institutions may stand out most. He called it the “darkest period” of his life.

“They chained me to the bed, they injected me with something that locked my jaw, and I lost my ability to speak for about 20 hours, and even then with great difficulty,” Mr. Sanjari said in one audio recounting of his experience on the application Clubhouse. He said he had been fed a cocktail of pills three times a day and given electric shocks nine times.

“I forgot who I was, what I was doing there, when was I taken there, how long I had been there,” Mr. Sanjari said. “I would ask the guard: ‘What is my name?’”

Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeini, a former reformist member of the Iranian Parliament who now lives in exile in Maryland, said in an interview that the government sometimes dispatched political prisoners to psychiatric institutions “as a way of humiliating and breaking the prisoner when they refuse to cooperate or confess.”

Mr. Sanjari gave life in America another go in 2022 and in 2024, but he returned to Iran after short stints both times, according to Mr. Memarian and Mr. Mousavi Khoeini, who helped with his travel arrangements.

Last Tuesday, Mr. Sanjari announced that he had to make a difficult decision about life and death. Then he issued his ultimatum to the government, saying he would take his own life if it did not release the prisoners by 7 p.m. the following day.

On Wednesday evening, he posted a bird’s-eye view photo of the street below as he stood on the edge of the commercial building. Then he expressed his hope for an Iran in which people were no longer imprisoned for their beliefs.

A video circulating on social media shortly after showed a body wrapped in white cloth on the side of a road drenched in rain. In the commotion of flashing red ambulance lights, emergency crews and passers-by, someone asked who it was.

“Kianoosh,” replied an emergency worker.

Sassan, a 40-year-old university lecturer and a close friend, said he had driven five hours from a city in northern Iran to Tehran as soon as he saw Mr. Sanjari’s ultimatum. Frantically checking his phone for updates, he said, he diverted to the site when he saw the photograph Mr. Sanjari had posted from the edge of the building. But it was too late.

“I’m angry,” Sassan said in a telephone interview. “Why had other friends left him alone? We all knew what he was going through.” Sassan asked that his last name not be published out of fear of retribution.

Mr. Sanjari was buried in Tehran on Friday under a heavy security presence and with only a few of his immediate family members. Security agents cordoned off the area in the cemetery and blocked a large crowd of people who had shown up to pay him last respects, according to witness accounts.