By; Rezvan Moghaddam

On Thursday, April 3, 2025, a 12-year-old girl named Ailar Zaherpoor from the village of
Sorkhak (Soweyrag), in the district of Eslamabad-e Gharb, Kermanshah Province, was
shot and killed by her father, Kiumars Zaherpoor, using a hunting rifle.
According to informed sources, Ailar was a child of divorced parents and custody had
been awarded to her father. The motive behind the killing was reportedly Ailar’s phone
contact with her mother, who lived separately after the divorce. One source confirmed
that following the crime, the father attempted suicide with the same firearm but survived
and was transferred to the hospital.
The shocking killing of Ailar Zaherpoor is a harrowing example of the intersection
between domestic violence, patriarchal control, and discriminatory custody laws in Iran.
Ailar was killed by her own father for the simple act of reaching out to her mother—her
mother who, because of divorce, had been removed from her daughter’s life.
In many similar cases in Iran, custody after divorce is granted to fathers, even when
they lack the psychological or moral fitness to care for the child. These judicial policies,
rooted in patriarchal and traditional notions of “guardianship,” put thousands of
children’s lives and mental well-being at risk. Ailar was one of the many victims of this
broken system—a girl who was not only deprived of maternal love, but ultimately lost
her life seeking it.
This tragedy is a dire warning to judicial and social institutions that routinely grant
custody to fathers without considering the child’s emotional safety, mental health, or
overall well-being. It is also a pointed critique of a patriarchal culture that sees a child’s
emotional connection to their mother as a threat to paternal authority. In a society where
contacting one’s mother becomes a “crime” punishable by death, the entire system
needs urgent reevaluation before the name of yet another child is added to the growing
list of domestic violence victims.
The killing of children by their fathers in the aftermath of divorce reveals the depth of the
crisis within Iran’s legal and social frameworks—where custody is still treated as a male
privilege, not an ethical and emotional responsibility. A judicial system that hands a
child’s fate to a father without thoroughly assessing his mental and behavioral fitness
becomes complicit in such violence. Ailar’s murder shows how separating a child from
her mother, especially in volatile and unsupervised environments, can end in death.

These cases are not isolated personal tragedies—they are loud cries for a fundamental
reassessment of custody laws and child protection mechanisms in Iran.

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