Local media in Iran say young girls on the streets of Tehran are having their long hair cut and stolen to sell to the beauty industry.

Sharq daily quoted an Afghan girl living in Tehran telling the story of being abducted by machete-wielding men in a car while their trunk was "full of hair bags".

She said: “I was coming home from school. Showing a knife, they took me into the car... There was a lady and a gentleman. When I got in, the two other girls were just crying…The man cut the hair of all three of us with scissors and tied it up.”

In recent years, Iranian media reported the increase in buying and selling women's hair due to financial needs, but there have been fewer reports of girls' hair being stolen.

Earlier and separate reports on the Khorasan and ISNA news websites said most of the hair reaches extension production companies in Turkey, Arab countries, China, Europe or even some countries of the Americas.

With the deepening economic crisis in Iran, in recent years, local media have repeatedly reported the "sharp increase" in the sale and purchase of body parts in Iran.

Jahan-e-Sanat daily wrote in May that some middlemen send the prospective donors to neighboring countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Iraq to sell their body parts for $7,000 to $15,000, the result of the country’s economic crisis, which has left many people struggling to survive.