Iran protests: mother of Nika Shakarami says her daughter was murdered by authorities

The mother of Nika Shakarami, a teenage girl who died during protests in Iran, has accused authorities of murdering her daughter.

In a video sent to US-funded Radio Farda, Nasrin Shakarami said she had seen injuries on her daughter’s body which contradict an official statement. Authorities say Nika, 16, appears to have been thrown from a building, possibly by workmen.

Nika went missing in Tehran on September 20th after telling a friend she was being chased by police. Nasrin said Nika’s aunt, who made a statement on TV on Wednesday in which she said her niece “was killed falling from a building” had been “forced… to make these confessions”.

The authorities “have called others, my uncles, others, saying that if Nika’s mother does not come forward and say the things we want, basically confess to the scenario that we want and have created, then we will do this and that, and threatened me,” Nasrin said.

Officials say that on the night she disappeared, Nika went into a building where eight construction workers were present, and that she was found dead in the yard outside the next morning.

Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari was cited by state media as saying on Wednesday that a post-mortem examination showed Nika suffered “multiple fractures… in the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, arms and legs, which indicate that the person was thrown from a height.”

However, her mother said that was not true. “I saw my daughter’s body myself… the back of her head showed she had suffered a very severe blow as her skull had caved in. That’s how she was killed.”

She said a forensic report found she had been killed on the day she joined the protests by a blunt force trauma to her head. A death certificate issued by a cemetery in Tehran, which was obtained by BBC Persian, states that Nika died after suffering “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object”.

Nika’s death has become one of the highest-profile cases among the protests which erupted last month following the death of Mahsa Amini. She was detained by the morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict hijab law.

Nika’s family say they located her body at the mortuary of a detention centre 10 days after she went missing, and that security forces stole it and buried her secretly.

Meanwhile, Iranian authorities have denied reports that another 16-year-old girl, Sarina Esmailzadeh, died after being severely beaten on the head with batons by security forces during protests in Karaj, north-east Iran, on 23 September.

The semi-official Isna news agency quoted the chief justice of Alborz province, where Sarina died, as saying that according to a preliminary investigation she killed herself by jumping off a five-storey building.

Several videos made by Sarina before her death have been posted on social media. In one recorded after finishing school exams, she says: “Nothing feels better than freedom.”

Rights groups say more than 150 people have been killed and thousands arrested since the protests began on 17 September.