Iranian Security Forces Molested and Killed Teen Protester

An Iranian teenager was sexually assaulted and killed by three men working for Iran's security forces, according to a leaked document from Iran.  The document shows what happened to 16-year-old Nika Shakarami who vanished from an anti-regime protest in 2022.  Her body was found nine days later. The government claimed she killed herself.

Marked "Highly Confidential", the report summarizes a hearing on Nika's case held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - the security force that defends the country's Islamic establishment. It includes what it says are the names of her killers and the senior commanders who tried to hide the truth.

It contains disturbing details of events in the back of an undercover van in which security forces were restraining Nika.  One of the men molested her while he was sitting on her.  Despite being handcuffed and restrained, Nika fought back, kicking and swearing.  Nika's fighting back provoked the men to beat her with batons.

Nika Shakarami's disappearance and death were widely reported, and her picture has become synonymous with the fight by women in Iran for greater freedoms. As street protests spread across Iran in the autumn of 2022, her name was shouted by crowds furious at the country's strict rules on the compulsory veil [hijab].

Just before she vanished, Nika was filmed on the evening of 20 September near Laleh Park in central Tehran, standing on a dumpster setting fire to hijabs. Others around her chanted "death to the dictator" - referring to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. What she could not have known at the time is that she was being watched, as the classified report makes clear.

Monitoring the demonstration were several undercover security units, the document's account begins.  It says one of these - Team 12 - suspected the teenager "of leadership, due to her unconventional behaviour and repeated calls with her mobile phone".  The team sent one of its operatives into the crowd, posing as a protester, to confirm Nika was indeed one of the demonstration's leaders. Then, according to the report, he called in his team to arrest her. But she fled.

Her aunt had previously told BBC Persian that Nika rang a friend that night to say she was being chased by security forces. Almost an hour passed before she was spotted again, says the report, when she was detained and put in the team's vehicle - an unmarked freezer van.

The captives then attempted to find somewhere to take her.  They tried a temporary police camp nearby but were turned away because it was overcrowded.  So they continued to a detention center, a 35-minute drive away, whose commander initially agreed to admit Nika. But then he changed his mind.  "The accused [Nika] was constantly swearing and chanting," he told investigators for the report.  "At that time, there were 14 other female detainees at the station and my perception was that she could agitate the others. "I was worried she would cause a riot".

One of the captors named Arash briefly turned on his phone torch and saw one of the other captors (named Sadegh) had put his hand inside her trousers.  Sadegh later contradicted Arash's account, which he said was motivated by professional jealousy. He denied putting his hand in her trousers - but said he could not deny that he became "aroused" while sitting on her and touched Nika's buttocks. He said this provoked Nika (despite the fact her hands were tied behind her back) to scratch him and jolt so that he fell over. "She kicked at my face, so I had to defend myself."

A captor in the front seat heard the commotion and ordered the driver to pull over. He opened the rear door to discover Nika's lifeless body. He said he cleaned the blood from her face and head - "which were not in a good condition".  The report concludes that a sexual assault caused the fight in the rear compartment of the van, and that strikes from Team 12 had caused Nika's death. "Three batons and three Tasers were all used. It is not clear which one of the blows was the fatal one," it says.

Nika's family found her body in a mortuary more than a week after she disappeared from a protest. But Iran's authorities denied Nika's death was connected to the demonstration and, after conducting their own investigation, said that she had died by suicide.    Nika's death certificate, however (obtained by BBC Persian) stated she was killed by "multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object". 

The report contradicts the government's narrative of what happened to Nika. Nearly a month after her funeral, a state television broadcast claimed that Nika had jumped to her death from a building.  "We all know that they are lying," Nasrin Shakarami later told a BBC documentary, discussing authorities' claims about the deaths of protesters.