Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiancé, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi have been arrested
An Iranian couple, Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiancé, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, both in their early twenties, received prison sentences of more than ten years on Tuesday after appearing in a video where they danced in front of an iconic Tehran landmark, activists said.
The young pair were arrested back in November after a footage of their romantic tango at the Azadi tower went viral.
In defiance of of the country's strict dress code and in the wake of months-long protests, Haghighi went without a headscarf. Women are additionally precluded from public dancing and singing in Iran, especially in the company of a man.
They were already popular on social networking sites in Iran at the time of the incident and the video had been heralded as symbolic of the country's protest movement against the hijab and wider rights.
However, now the question remains what were the repercussions the pair had to face for it.
The pair was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison. They also face a ban on using the internet and leaving the country, the US-based rights group the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported.
HRANA cited that people who knew the families of the couple in reporting that the trials had gone forward without the pair having a right to legal representation. Efforts to secure a release on bail were also decnied by the so-called.
Haghighi is now in Qarchak prison, a notorious women's prison outside Tehran. Conditions at Qarchak are routinely condemned by activists.
For the unversed, the iconic Azadi Tower, which means "freedom," opened under the country's last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in the early 1970s. He was ousted in 1979 during the Islamic Revolution.