What happened to Nika Shakarami?

The death of an Iranian teenager who disappeared while taking part in protests over the killing of another young woman has further stoked tensions in the country.

Nika Shakarami was “found dead in a morgue housed in a detention centre” by her family last week, just days before what would have been her 17th birthday, reported BBC Persian. Nika had been missing for ten days after attending one of the anti-government protests that have erupted following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody.

The unrest has spread to “dozens of cities” nationwide despite “government efforts to clamp down” on the protesters, said ITV News, and is “the most widespread challenge to Iran’s leadership in years”.

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How did Nika die?

The teenager was last seen alive by her family on 20 September, when she left her home in Tehran at around 5pm local time to attend a protest against Islamic laws that disproportionately inhibit the freedom of women.

The unrest erupted three weeks ago after ethnic Kurish woman Amini was arrested by the so-called morality police during a trip to the capital, for allegedly breaking the country’s strict female dress regulations. Amini’s cousin told Sky News that she died as a result of blows to the head after being “tortured and insulted”.

Nika’s family have also accused the authorities of murder. The teenager was last heard from during a phone call with a friend, when Nika said that she was “running away from security agents”, The Sun reported.

“That night her Telegram and Instagram accounts were deleted and her mobile phone went dead,” the paper continued. Her family “spent the next ten days searching for her in prisons, hospitals and even the mortuary”, before being told that “a girl matching her description was in the Kahrizak morgue”, located in a local detention centre.

Nika’s aunt, Atash Shakarami, told the BBC that the authorities “didn’t allow us to see her body, only her face for a few seconds”. According to reports, her skull had been fractured and her nose was broken.

After recovering her body, Nika’s family had planned to bury her on Monday, but “her body was snatched” by security forces and “buried in a village about 40km (25 miles) away”, the BBC reported.

Amid growing anger over the alleged killing and secret burial, the schoolgirl “has become an icon for the anti-government movement”, said The Guardian. The outcry has prompt an official investigation, with Iranian media reporting on Tuesday that the security forces had arrested eight people in connection with her death.

The authorities have denied having any involvement and “the official cause of death was given as a fall from a height”, The Sun reported.

Iran’s judiciary have also “rejected any connection” between the death and the ongoing protests, reported France 24.

An autopsy had found “multiple fractures... in the pelvis, head, upper and lower limbs, arms and legs which indicate that the person was thrown from a height”, Tehran judiciary official Mohammad Shahriari reportedly told state media. He added: “The incident has nothing to do with the recent disturbances.”

Human rights groups have accused the government of responding to the protests with “a bloody crackdown in which dozens of people have been killed and hundreds more injured”, said The Guardian.

What next?

The authorities have “intensified efforts to stamp out the protests as they spread around the country and across ethnic and class divides”, said The Guardian.

For years, Iran’s clerical government has “stamped out dissent with arbitrary detentions and even mass executions”, said CNN. But in spite of “the government’s decades-old intimidation tactics”, the protestors remain “defiant”.

Students who gathered outside Mashhad University this week chanted: “This is not a protest anymore. This is the start of a revolution.”

Not everyone is so hopeful. The Iranian authorities had been “caught off balance”, said The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, but “if the past is a tutor, it is easy to write the obituary of this round of protests”.