Explained: Who is 16-yr-old Nika Shakarami, the latest symbol of Iran protests?

After Mahsa Amini, now a 16-year-old girl has become the latest symbol of the uprising against the country’s rulers.

Nika Shakarami went missing on 20 September after attending a march in Tehran over the death of Amini.

Ten days later, authorities told Nika’s family her body had been found.

While authorities claimed Nika fell to her death from a high-rise, her mother Nasreen has alleged that she died of blows to the back of the head.

Let’s take a look at Nika’s case:

Who was she? What happened to her?

Nika was a teenager described as ‘carefree and full of life’.

According to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, a clip of Nika singing and dancing to an Iranian love song from the famous 1968 film Soltane Ghalbha has gone viral on social media.

The clip shows Nika can be seen laughing and playfully telling her friends not to make fun of her.

Nasreen Shakarami said her daughter left her home in Tehran to join anti-hijab protests.

She said she was in touch by phone with Nika several times in the next few hours, pleading with her to come home. They last spoke before midnight. “Then Nika’s mobile was off, after she and her friends were shouting names of forces while they were fleeing,” she said.

_The New Arab r_eported that Nika messaged a friend on the day of her disappearance, saying she was being chased by security forces.

2/On the evening of Sept 20, Nika called a friend on her way home & said she had joined the protests & burned her scarf. She never made it home.

Her phone was turned off & her What’sApp, Telegram & Instagram accounts were deactivated. She was missing for 10 days.#نیکا_شاکرمی pic.twitter.com/mKTb5XcEOs

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 4, 2022

Nika’s aunt, Atash Shakarami, told BBC Persian she left home around 5 pm on 20 September and that they were in contact till 7 pm.

Aatash said Nika’s Instagram and Telegram accounts were also deleted after she went missing, as per BBC.

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, as per the report.

As per Washington Post, the family filed a missing persons report and hunted for Nika at hospitals and police stations without success.

As per ABC, authorities then arrested Atash and Nika’s uncle Mohsen after she posted messages online about her niece’s death and spoke to the media.

Prior to her arrest, Atash told BBC Persian that the Revolutionary Guards told her that Nika was in their custody for five days and then handed over to prison authorities.

A day later, Atash said on Iranian TV that her niece fell from a high building.

The BBC reported that Nika’s uncle was seen on TV speaking out against the unrest as someone seemed to whisper to him: “Say it, you scumbag.”

Atash last tweeted on 2 October.

There are reports Nika Shakarami had been held in Kahrizak prison outside Tehran but this has not been confirmed by the Iranian authorities.

‘Saw body myself’

Nasreen believes her siblings had been pressured to echo the official version.

Iran has a long history of broadcasting forced 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,” Nasreen was quoted as saying by BBC.

Nasreen, in a video sent to US-funded Radio Farda, said, “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.”

When the family saw her body, her nose had been smashed and skull cracked, reports said.

In her video message, she said that the forensics report showed that Nika had died from repeated blows to the head.

Nika’s body was intact, but some of her teeth, bones in her face and part of the back of her skull were broken, she said. “The damage was to her head,” she said. “Her body was intact, arms and legs.”

BBC Persian reported on Monday that an autopsy report by the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in the area had concluded she died due to multiple injuries sustained by being hit “with a hard object”.

Media including BBC Persian and Iran Wire have said that Nika’s family were permitted to see the body of Nika in a morgue but were not allowed to bury her in their home town of Khorramabad in Lorestan province.

Nasreen also said authorities kept her daughter Nika’s death a secret for nine days and then snatched the body from a morgue to bury her in a remote area, against the family’s wishes.

Hundreds of protesters later gathered in Khorramabad’s cemetery and chanted slogans against the government, including “death to the dictator” - a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, as per BBC.

Nika was secretly buried by the authorities on 3 October, the date which would have marked her 17th birthday, in a village dozens of kilometres away from Khorramabad.

Footage published on social media, including by the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, instead showed the family attending a protest in her memory in Khorramabad with her distraught mother declaring: “Today was your birthday, my dear!… Today I say, congratulations on your martyrdom!”

Images said to show her burial site in the village of Veysian show a dirt grave with a roughly cut headstone.

‘Nothing to do with disturbances’

Iran’s judiciary has any connection between the death of Nika Shakarami and protests over the death of Mahsa Amini.

An autopsy showed “multiple fractures… in the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, arms and legs which indicate that the person was thrown from a height,” state news agency IRNA quoted Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari as saying.

“No bullet marks were found… and the evidence shows that the death was caused by the person being thrown,” he said.

“The incident has nothing to do with the recent disturbances.”

Iran’s police chief, Gen. Hossein Ashtari, earlier this week claimed that the teen had gone to a building “and fell from the upper floor at a time of gatherings.” He said that “the fall from that height led to her death.”

State-aligned news agency Tasnim reported that eight people have been arrested, all of them in the building where Shakarami allegedly entered.

However, according to the Washington Post Tasnim is close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp whose police force, the Basij, have been a key part of the crackdown on protesters.

Fars News, which is also IRGC-affiliated, released video footage Wednesday that it said showed Shakarami entering the building, though the person is not identifiable, as per the report.

State-run IRNA quoted Tehran’s prosecutor Ali Salehi as saying that a judicial criminal case has been launched and expressing his condolences to Shakarami’s family.

Protests enter fourth week

The protests, which enter their fourth week Saturday, were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police. They had detained Amini for alleged violations of the country’s strict Islamic dress code.

Young women have often been leading the protests, tearing off and defiantly waving their headscarves as they call for toppling the government.

The protests quickly spread to communities across Iran and have been met by a harsh government crackdown, including beatings, arrests and killings of demonstrators, as well as internet disruptions.

Human rights groups estimate that dozens of protesters have been killed over the past three weeks. On Thursday, the London-based group Amnesty International published its findings about what appears to be the single deadliest incident so far — in the city of Zahedan on 30 September.

The report said Iranian security forces killed at least 66 people, including children, and wounded hundreds, after firing live rounds at protesters, bystanders and worshippers in a violent crackdown that day. Iranian authorities claimed the Zahedan violence involved unnamed separatists. More than a dozen people have been killed since then in the area, the report said.

With inputs from agencies

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