TEL AVIV. Nika, like Mahsa, died with a smashed skull. By whom, it is not yet certain, but the suspicions are all on the security forces of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian judiciary said on Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into the death of the teenager Nika Shahkarami. Disappeared during the three-week protests in various Iranian cities as a reaction to the killing of another young woman, Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old who died three days after being arrested by the moral police for not wearing the hijab correctly, the Islamic veil.
The body of 16-year-old Nika was found by her family in a Tehran morgue, ten days after her last voice message to a friend, claiming she was being chased by the police. The family later revealed that the security forces would have ordered them to avoid the funeral ceremony for the girl. They would then take her body to bury it in a village 40 kilometers from the place where she was expected to be buried, in Khorramabad, the hometown of her father.
“The case was filed with the criminal court to investigate the causes of death – the Tehran prosecutor Ali Salehi replied to the official Irna news agency – and the necessary measures have been taken in this regard”. Then yesterday, the results of the autopsy on the body of the Iranian Kurdish girl were disclosed by Irna, who reported the statements of Mohammad Shahriari, an official of the judiciary of the Islamic Republic: “Multiple fractures in the pelvis, head, upper limbs and lower “would indicate, according to the Iranian leader, that Nika Shahkarami has fallen,” thrown from above “. “No bullet marks were found,” he added, and therefore “the incident has nothing to do with the recent riots.” But for her family the girl had “a smashed head and a fractured nose”, and on the young woman’s body there were rape and torture marks “sutures, hand stitches”, and the internal organs had been removed. While her aunt her aunt Atash Shakarami revealed that in her last message received from her, her niece told her to “be chased by the security forces.”
A sign that Nika may have been beaten and tortured to death by agents, as in all probability happened to Mahsa. Another victim of repression, younger and younger, just as the protesters are younger and younger. University students but also high school students, universities and high schools in various cities of Iran, from Teheran to Karaj to Zanjan, from Mashhad to Kerman, to Shiraz. Such a widespread wave had not been seen in Iran for nearly three years. In some videos, shared online, female students leave the classrooms and take part in flash-mobs to avoid being discovered.
The regime is also trying to stifle protests on social networks, with almost total Internet blocks, while the security forces are busy taming the streets, killing dozens of people and arresting hundreds. According to the Swedish NGO Iran Human Rights, which reports the numbers collected by the portal of Iranian dissidents abroad Iran International, at least 154 people were killed, including 9 minors. A ferocious repression that is attracting global condemnation. The European Union has joined the United States in warning of new and severe sanctions, punitive measures against senior Iranian officials such as freezing of assets and suspension of the right to travel. But Iran rebounds the threats, accusing those who point the finger at it of fueling the protests. British ambassador Simon Shercliff was summoned to Tehran by the Iranian foreign ministry, in protest against London’s criticism of the interventions of Iranian forces during the demonstrations for Mahsa Amini, deemed “false and provocative” by the Islamic Republic. –