Nika Shakarami
Relatives of a girl who died during protests in Iran have been forced into making false statements, a source close to the family has told BBC Persian.
Nika Shakarami, 16, went missing in Tehran on 20 September after telling a friend she was being chased by police. On Wednesday night, a state TV report showed her aunt, Atash, saying: “Nika was killed falling from a building.” Her uncle was also seen on TV speaking against the unrest, as someone seems to whisper to him: “Say it, you scumbag!”
They apparently smashed every bone in her body.
Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari was cited by state media as saying on Wednesday that a post-mortem 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”.
Or that the guards were very thorough.
However, a death certificate issued by a cemetery in the capital, which was obtained by BBC Persian, states that she died after suffering “multiple injuries caused by blows with a hard object”.
Nika’s Instagram and Telegram accounts were also deleted after she went missing, according to Atash. Iranian security forces are known to demand that detainees give them access to the social media accounts so that the accounts or certain posts can be deleted.
Their god really hates women.
Nika is not the only young female protester to have been killed during the unrest that erupted last month following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by the morality police for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict hijab law.
The family of Hadis Najafi, 22, have said that she was shot dead by security forces while protesting in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, on 21 September. Officials allegedly asked her father to say that she died of a heart attack.
Another 16-year-old girl, Sarina Esmailzadeh, died after being severely beaten on the head with batons by security forces during protests in Karaj on 23 September, Amnesty International cited a source as saying. The source also told the human rights group that security and intelligence agents had harassed the girl’s family to coerce them into silence.
Woman is the enemy.
What a horrible, agonizing way to die. This regime is unspeakably evil in how it deals with women and girls.
Does anyone else remember when Iran was a nascent democracy? And that the profits of AIOC were far more important than self determination for Iranians.
What happened in Iran in 1953 has been mirrored in 21C Venezuela. Oil profits belong to corporations, not people.
These Iranian women, and the few men who support them, are as brave as those who ran the Underground Railway and the French Resistance, but I fear their efforts will be in vain. Even if they win, they will lose. Even if they manage to regain some semblance of democracy and equality, it will not survive long. Democracy is never permitted to Arabic and Persian people.
Is this all you wims have to worry about? This is nothing. Every day, trans people are suffering the agony of ignored pronouns and being called sir instead of ma’am.
I have the opposite problem: not every day but quite often someone — typically a representative of some organization — calls me Madame on the telephone, and continues to do so after I’ve corrected them. If someone wants to think I’m a woman that’s not a problem for me: my wife, daughters and sisters know that I’m not a woman and they’re the only ones who matter. However, I’ve decided that the next time it happens I’ll address the caller as Madame (if it’s a man) or Monsieur (if it’s a woman).