Four days after the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by Iran’s morality police, protests in favor of women’s freedoms spread across several cities in the country. Nika Shakarami was identified as one of its leaders. That day the 16-year-old girl burned a hijab from the top of a container and also threw stones at the police, near Laheh Park, in the capital, Tehran. Hours later, she would die in the back of a van at the hands of the security forces, after being sexually assaulted and severely beaten, as revealed on Tuesday by the BBC. She was found nine days later in a morgue. The ayatollah regime created the version of her suicide, but the street did not believe it and her death unleashed even more anger.
The British media corporation has had access to a “highly confidential” report summarizing the hearing on Nika’s case held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the security force that defends the country’s Islamic regime. The document includes the names of his murderers as well as those of the senior commanders who tried to hide the truth.
The document details that Team 12, a security force unit linked to the Iranian paramilitary group Hizbullah (different from the group of the same name in Lebanon), detained Nika after identifying her as one of the leaders of the protest. She was put tied by her arms in the back of the van along with three men armed with batons and stun guns. One of the men laid her down on the lid of her freezer, sat on top of her and put his hand down her pants. She defended herself by kicking and insulting him as best she could. And the men began to beat her repeatedly until she died.
It all started that September 20, at the protest near Laheh Park. A member of Team 12, who were working undercover that night, wanted to arrest her, but she fled. That’s when she called a friend of hers to tell her that security forces were chasing her. Shortly after, they found her and put her in the vehicle, with her hands tied. The group tried to find a police center to hand her over, but the first was too full and she was turned away from the second. The supervisor feared that she would cause a riot along with the other 14 young women who were arrested there.
On the way to Evin prison was when the beating took place. Nika started shouting slogans and one of the men put his socks in her mouth. Then she sat on top of her and sexually assaulted her. When she tried to defend herself against him with everything she could, including a kick to that man’s face, they all responded with punches. It was dark and, according to one of them in the report, they did not know who they were hitting. When the leader of the group, Morteza Jalil, who was in front of the vehicle with the driver, went to see what was happening, he found the lifeless body of the young woman, bloody on the face and head, “which were not in good condition.” “.
Khalil admits in the report that he did not try to find out what had happened. “He was just thinking about how to move her and I didn’t ask anyone questions. I just asked, ‘Is she breathing?’ I think it was Behrooz Sadeghy who answered: ‘no, she’s dead.'”
Jalil called the Revolutionary Guard headquarters again for the third time. On this occasion, he spoke to a senior officer, codenamed ‘Naeem 16’. This man admitted that there were other dead protesters at the police facilities. “We already had deaths in our stations and I did not want the number to increase to 20,” Naeem 16 told the inquest. “Bringing her to the base wouldn’t have solved any problems,” he added. He told Jalil to just “leave her in the street” and Jalil obeyed: he left Nika’s body under a highway.
Her family found her in a morgue after she had been missing for nine days. Nika’s death certificate, obtained by the BBC Persian edition in October 2022, states that she was killed by “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object.”
The secret report of the Revolutionary Guard concludes that the sexual assault provoked the fight in the back of the van and that the three men killed her using three batons and three stun guns. The report contradicts the government version that, almost a month after Nika’s funeral, published the official investigation on state television, which said that Nika had jumped to his death from a building. Her mother never identified that girl in the investigation images as her daughter.
The persecution of Nika has extended to her family. According to her mother on Instagram, several people who attended her funeral were retaliated against and a year later they had to cancel the ceremony for the first anniversary of her death for the same reason. Her sister Aida was arrested two weeks ago by the morality police for not wearing the hijab. She was released a week later on bail.
