Video shows Iranian police beating, sexually humiliating teenage detainee

On September 17, 2026, a 78-second video was widely shared on social media. The footage appears to have been recorded by a police officer present at the scene. The Observers team geolocated the video to the courtyard of a police station in Tabriz, capital of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, where most inhabitants speak a dialect of the Azeri language.

At least five Iranian police officers and another man in civilian clothes can be seen in the video. Four officers punch and kick the teenage boy, while two subject him to sexualised humiliation.

At one point, one officer pulls the boy’s trousers partly down. The officers then mock him as two of them slap and grab his buttocks.

The dialogue heard in the video is in Azeri. Subtitles have been added in Persian.

Policeman: Do you see him? He goes around pulling knives on people. He’s the big thug in the neighbourhood! We haven’t seen your ass yet. Oh, he’s got a white ass, the big thug in the neighbourhood! Don’t move, you thug.

Victim: I’m not a thug. Why are you doing this?

Policeman: It’s so white [a reference to the teen’s buttocks].  He’s going to be raped at this police station. 

On September 18, police in East Azerbaijan province said the incident dated back to June 4, when the teenager was arrested following a street fight. They said the boy was 17 at the time of his arrest. They did not say whether he had been charged or convicted in connection with the incident.

By cross-referencing multiple sources, including other videos of police stations in Tabriz available on social media, FRANCE 24 was able to geolocate the footage.

The video was recorded in the courtyard of Police Station No. 14, in a poor neighbourhood in southwest Tabriz.

A day after the video was posted, widely circulated on social media and picked up by Iranian media – prompting public outrage – Fars News, an Iranian news agency close to the Revolutionary Guard Corps, published a video report titled “A glimpse of the Tabriz criminal’s violent conduct”.

In the report, Fars News interviews several people who say they were attacked with a machete by the teenager seen in the video. The report portrays him as a source of insecurity in the neighbourhood.

According to the police statement, the teenager had prior convictions for involvement in street fights, harassment and drug dealing. Police said the incident was under investigation and that none of these allegations justified the officers’ improper conduct. They said all the officers involved had been disciplined and suspended until further notice, with any additional punishment dependent on a court ruling. The police did not specify whether the officers were disciplined before or after the video emerged on September 17. 

‘We are seeing more and more sexual harassment in recent years’

Niki Mahjoub is an Iranian independent journalist based in Europe who has covered social issues in Iran for more than three decades.

The police not only fail to hide some of this misconduct, they sometimes even display it openly.

Parading people accused of violent crimes through cities while beating and publicly humiliating them is a common punishment for those the authorities call “thugs”.

In recent years, the situation has escalated. The authorities have even published videos showing suspects who were shot with live ammunition during their arrest.

We are also seeing more and more cases of sexual harassment in recent years. We do not know whether this means such incidents are becoming more frequent, or whether social media has simply made it easier for information about them to emerge. This is the first video evidence we have seen of a form of sexual harassment that we know has happened repeatedly.

As horrific as this is, in this particular case we are talking about a teenager – a child under the age of 18 – who requires particular protection and treatment.

Read more'We will shoot the thugs': Iranian police crack down on crime

“Human Rights groups have documented systematic sexual harassment”

Personally, I have worked as a journalist for decades, and for as long as I can remember, violence has been part of the Iranian police culture.

They have even coined an expression for it: “technical interrogation”, which in practice means severe violence that can extend to psychological and sexual abuse.

But there are no statistics or comprehensive studies on violence against people accused of ordinary crimes in Iran. To some extent, this may be because many of those accused face charges such as robbery, rape or other violent crimes, and even human rights activists have often kept their distance from them.

Several human rights groups, for example, have documented systematic sexual harassment and abuse of young women and men arrested during protests in Iran, including in January 2026 and during the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in 2023. But we do not have comparable documentation for people accused of ordinary crimes.

The few testimonies we do have about what common criminals experience in prison or detention often come from political prisoners who encountered them behind bars and later had a platform to speak publicly about what they had witnessed.

Figures such as Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, have testified about people imprisoned for ordinary crimes whom they met in detention and who had been subjected to severe violence, sexual harassment and rape.

In one case highlighted by Mohammadi, a woman imprisoned for an ordinary crime was allegedly raped by her interrogator and later underwent an abortion in prison.’

“This is a PR effort”

Mahjoub is not convinced by the police statement saying the officers will be held accountable:

‘I don’t believe there will be any real consequences. The simple question is: if they really care about this kind of abuse, why didn’t they prosecute these officers before the video went viral?

I believe this is a PR effort aimed at containing the public reaction. Personally, I don’t remember any case in which a political prisoner or someone accused of an ordinary crime pursued accountability for this kind of violence and achieved any meaningful result.’

Police Station No. 14 in Tabriz has previously been linked to at least one other publicly reported case involving alleged human rights violations. In 2023, Iranian security forces violently arrested a local activist and two members of his family and detained them at the police station for a day without medical care.