Nika Shakarami

On 20 September 2022, 16-year-old Iranian girl Nika Shakarami disappeared in Tehran during the 2022 Iranian protests following the death of Mahsa Amini.

Her family was informed of her death ten days later.

She had died under suspicious circumstances suspected to involve violence by security forces.

After her body was identified by her family, they planned to bury her in Khorramabad, but the body was allegedly stolen by Iranian authorities and instead buried in Hayat ol Gheyb, reportedly to exercise leverage over her family and to avoid a funeral procession which could cause further protests.

The Iranian authorities denied wrongdoing, spread several contradictory stories concerning her fate, and allegedly coerced some of her family members to support these narratives.

Shakarami's death and the attempts of government suppression regarding information on her fate was widely publicized in international media and further fanned the ongoing protests.

Her official cause of death was later described as blunt force trauma in a Behesh-e Zahra document.

Shakarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh and Hadis Najafi, according to media sources, became the new faces of the ongoing protests in Iran, and their pictures appeared on posters, that were secretly plastered on the walls in Iranian cities.

Nika Shakarami was born on 2 October 2005 in Khorramabad, Lorestan province, to a Lur family.

Little is publicly known of her background.

She had family ties to Khorramabad in southwestern Iran, the city having been her father's hometown.

She was the second child in the family.

Shakarami lived with her aunt in Tehran, the capital of Iran, and worked in a coffee shop.

She moved to Tehran after the death of her father.

Shakarami participated in the Mahsa Amini protests of September 2022, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody and aimed at increasing women's rights in Iran.

Shakarami went missing after protesting on Keshavarz Boulevard in Tehran on 20 September.

She had left her house around 13:00 UTC and brought with her a bottle of water and a towel as protection against tear gas.

She initially told her family that she was going to visit her sister.

According to Shakarami's family, the last known communication was a message sent to one of her friends in which she said she was being chased by security forces.

Apparently, she had been separated from her friends as the protests grew more crowded.

Her friends last saw her around 15:00 UTC.

On the night of 20 September, Shakarami's Telegram and Instagram accounts were deleted and her phone was turned off.

According to CNN, on 12 October, her Telegram account was briefly reactivated, likely by Iranian authorities, and family members confirmed that Shakarami's phone was in the possession of the prosecutor's office in Tehran.

Iranian state media also reported that authorities had accessed direct messages on her Instagram account.

On 27 October 2022, CNN released footage of Nika Shakarami's last hours during the protests.

In one video she can be seen hiding behind cars in traffic, saying to a driver "Don't move, don't move", implying that she was targeted and had been chased.

The person who provided the video to CNN said they saw Nika being arrested and put into a police van.

After not hearing from her, Shakarami's family filed a missing person's report and began searching police stations and hospitals.

They also posted pictures of her on social media in the hope that someone would recognize her.

Ten days later they were informed that someone with similar characteristics had been discovered during forensic examinations of dead protesters and her body was at the Kahrizak morgue, located in a local detention center.

Shakarami's family members were not allowed to see the body, only to look at her face for a few seconds for identification purposes.

The authorities reportedly informed them that she had died as a result of falling from a great height.

They were shown a photograph of her lifeless body at a sidewalk to illustrate this but they found the picture to be suspicious.

Shakarami's aunt claimed in an interview that Shakarami's nose had been completely destroyed and that her skull had been "broken and disintegrated from multiple blows of a hard object", perhaps a baton.

The family were told that Shakarami had been kidnapped, held, and questioned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for a week and had then been detained for a short time at the Evin Prison, a prison which has frequently been accused of systematically raping and torturing prisoners.

The family transported Shakarami's body to Khorramabad for burial, intending to hold the ceremony on 2 October, which would have been her seventeenth birthday.

The family however claims that security forces pressured them into not holding a funeral ceremony and instead bury her in silence.

Shakarami's aunt defied such pressure and posted on Twitter, inviting anyone interested to join the celebration of Shakarami's "last birthday".

Shakarami's aunt and uncle were arrested shortly thereafter in their home on 2 October and other family members were threatened that she would be executed if they participated in the protests.

The rest of the family were also pressured to agree to not organize a public funeral ceremony.