Nika Shakarami: The Girl Who Refused to Be Silent

Nika Shakarami was born in Khorramabad, in the western province of Lorestan, on 2 October 2005. Her father died when she was eight. By 2019 the family had moved to Karaj, and in 2021 she went to Tehran to live with her paternal aunt, Atash Shakarami, a painter, in a flat near Keshavarz Boulevard.

She was studying painting at the Vahdat Vocational School and working at a café near Enghelab Square. Her aunt encouraged the drawing. A video that circulated after her death shows her singing and dancing with friends to a love song from the 1968 Iranian film *Soltane Ghalbha*, laughing. That is close to the whole of what is documented about her life — she was sixteen, and there was not yet very much of a public record to leave behind.

## The twentieth of September

Four days after Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of Iran's morality police, Nika went into central Tehran. Students had been gathering near Laleh Park since late afternoon. She told her mother by phone where she was: Enghelab Square, Keshavarz Boulevard, Valiasr Street. CNN later geolocated video from each of those places.

Two news organisations — CNN and the BBC — independently verified footage of her from that evening. It shows a girl in black climbing onto an overturned rubbish bin, holding up her headscarf as it burns, while the crowd around her chants *marg bar dictator*. A witness told CNN she would not come down. She burned more than one scarf.

At 8:37 p.m., a timestamped clip shows her ducking behind a white car near the University of Tehran, shouting *tekoon nakhor* — "don't move" — to the people with her. Sounds resembling gunfire are audible.

Her last call to her mother came at around half past eleven. Nasrin Shakarami said she could hear Nika's friends naming security forces and saying they were running. Shortly after midnight, Nika sent a message to a friend saying she was being chased. Then her phone went dead, and her Instagram and Telegram accounts were deleted.

## Nine days

Her body was found the next morning by residents of a building in Tehran, and logged at the morgue as Unknown. Nobody contacted her family. On 26 September her aunt Atash announced publicly that she was missing. On 29 September the family were taken to the morgue at the Kahrizak detention centre and permitted to look at her face for a few seconds. They were not allowed to see the rest of her.

On 2 October — what would have been her seventeenth birthday — her body was moved to Khorramabad, and her family were pressed into agreeing that there would be no funeral. Security forces raided the house and arrested Atash. Before the burial could take place, the body was taken and buried under armed guard at Hayat al-Ghaib cemetery, near the village of Veysian, roughly forty kilometres away.

## Two accounts, and one document

The Iranian state's position was given at a press conference: a Tehran judiciary official said the autopsy showed multiple fractures consistent with a fall from height, that no bullet marks were found, and that the case "has nothing to do with the recent disturbances." The national police chief said she fell from an upper floor; Iranian media later quoted a prosecutor describing it as suicide.

The strongest fact in this case is not a leak or a testimony. It is the state's own paperwork. Her burial permit records the cause of death as **multiple injuries caused by being struck with a hard object.** BBC Persian obtained the certificate in October 2022; CNN says it separately verified the same wording. The government said she fell. The government's own document says she was beaten.

Her mother, who saw the body, told Radio Farda: "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."

In April 2024, BBC Eye published a document it describes as the summary of an internal Revolutionary Guard hearing, part of a 322-page case file. According to that document, an undercover unit detained Nika at the protest, mistaking her for an organiser, and she died in their custody; the body was then left on the street. The BBC spent months on authentication and stated plainly it could not be certain. The Iranian judiciary called the report fabricated. No court or UN body has adjudicated it.

## What is established

- She attended the Tehran protests of 20 September 2022 and burned her headscarf on video — verified independently by CNN and the BBC from geolocated footage. - Her last message said she was being chased by security forces; her phone went dead and her accounts were deleted that night. - She was missing for nine days while her body lay in a morgue logged as unidentified. - Her burial permit records death by blows with a hard object — not a fall — attested independently by BBC Persian and CNN. - Her family were denied a funeral and her body was taken and buried under guard, forty kilometres from home. - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Iran Human Rights all rejected the state's account and placed her within a documented pattern of children killed by blows to the head.

## What is disputed, or not established

- Where her body was recovered — three incompatible accounts exist, and no source reconciles them. - Whether she was ever in official state custody before her death. - The leaked IRGC document — carefully verified by the BBC, which nonetheless declined to claim certainty, and denied by Iran. - The exact date her family identified the body (29 or 30 September — sources differ).

## After

The fortieth-day memorial at her grave on 27 October 2022 became a protest of its own; security forces fired tear gas and live rounds at the mourners. The chant that came out of it — "We are all Nika" — spread across the country. Her death, alongside that of Sarina Esmailzadeh, also sixteen, helped drive the wave of schoolgirl protests in which students pulled off their headscarves in classrooms and courtyards.

Her family have not been left alone since. Her sister Aida was arrested twice in 2024. Her mother Nasrin was arrested in Khorramabad in October 2024 after saying publicly that security officers had stopped her holding a memorial. Her aunt Atash was sentenced to thirty-eight lashes for "spreading false information"; Hengaw reports the flogging was carried out on 10 November 2025.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission found that Iran committed crimes against humanity in its response to the 2022 protests, with as many as 551 protesters killed. Nobody has been prosecuted for Nika Shakarami's death.

---

*Documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, BBC Eye and CNN. This record separates what independent sources establish from what is contested or unknown; where accounts conflict, the conflict is stated rather than resolved. Corrections and additional documentation are welcome at pulsepersia.com/contact.*