16-year-old Nika Shakarami was filmed burning her hijab in front of a crowd at an anti-government demonstration in 2022.
Teenager An Iranian girl who became a symbol of anti-hijab protests was sexually assaulted and then beaten to death by a radical unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), new documents show.
Nika Shakarami, 16, disappeared on September 20, 2022, shortly after she was filmed burning her hijab in front of a crowd at an anti-government demonstration in Tehran sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody earlier that month.
Her family discovered her body was taken to a mortuary outside the capital nine days later. State officials later told them she died after falling from a building, but her family never accepted that explanation.
It has now emerged that she was kidnapped and raped by three members of Iran's Hezbollah, a radical group linked to the Revolutionary Guards, according to a summary of a trial held after her death that was leaked to the BBC.
When Shakarami resisted, she was beaten to death to death, her captors admit in a document marked “strictly confidential.”
The Telegraph could not independently verify the document.
Nika Shakarami burns her hijab in front of a crowd during an anti-government protest in 2022.
In it, three named Team 12 officers explain how they sent one of their fighters, disguised as a protester, into the crowd that gathered around Shakarami in September. 20 to confirm her role as one of the leaders of the demonstration.
When they went to arrest her, she managed to flee the scene.
This matches her last known contact, when she wrote a message to a friend: “I am running away from the armed security forces.”
According to the document, nearly an hour passed before the team was able to track Shakarami.
She was forced into the back of the team's vehicle – a van with a freezer – but officers said she put up a strong resistance. .
“Arash Kalhor stuffed her socks in her mouth, but she began to resist. Then Sadegh [Monjazi] put her on the freezer and sat on her. The situation has calmed down,” one officer is quoted as saying.
The officer said he then briefly turned on his phone's flashlight to illuminate the pitch-dark back of the van and saw his colleague “[put] his hand down her pants.”
Beating with batons
When she resisted sexual assault , the police began beating her with batons and stun guns.
One officer said: “He doesn’t know… who [did it], but he heard… the baton hit the accused [Nika]… I started kicking and punching her , but I didn’t really know whether I was hitting our guys or the accused.”
By the time the driver stopped, Shakarami was dead.
The team leader said he washed the blood from her face and head, “which were not in good condition.”
The team then called their IRGC handler and was ordered to “throw her out on the street.”
The report concludes that it was Team 12 who killed Shakarami.
“A total of three batons and three stun guns were used. It is unclear which of the blows was fatal,” the report says.
The alleged attack matches her family's concerns about the condition her body was in when they finally tracked her down on September 29.
“In the morning, when [police] went to hand over the body, they saw that her nose was destroyed, and the skull was broken and destroyed from multiple blows with a hard object,” her aunt Atash Shakarami told the BBC at the time.
Her relatives told the BBC that when they went to identify Shakarami’s body, they were only allowed to briefly see her face .
Nika Shakarami pictured with her sister Aida Shakarami (right)
Security forces then “stolen” the body and buried him in a remote village, relatives said at the time.
The recent revelations have sparked outrage among Iranians on social media, although some have also questioned why the information was leaked.
“We will take revenge on Nika.” ,” a user wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “But be careful, they are deliberately leaking this information to the media to intimidate us against future uprisings.”
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