Hezbollah IRGC unit ‘killed teenager after sexual assault’
A TEENAGE Iranian girl who became a symbol for anti-hijab protests was sexually assaulted and then beaten to death by a radical branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), new documents reveal.
Nika Shakarami, 16, disappeared on Sept 20 2022, shortly after she was filmed burning a hijab in front of a crowd at a demonstration in Tehran sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody earlier that month.
Her family found her body in a morgue outside the capital nine days later. The state told them she had died falling from a building, but her family have never accepted the explanation.
It has now been revealed that she was abducted and molested by three members of Iranian Hezbollah, a radical group linked to the IRGC, according to a summary of a court hearing held after her death leaked to the BBC.
When Shakarami fought back, she was beaten to death, her abductors admit in the document, which is marked “highly confidential”.
The Telegraph could not independently verify the document.
In the file, three named officers from Team 12 explain how they tracked her down after she fled the protest and bundled her into the back of the team’s vehicle – a freezer van – where she put up heavy resistance.
“Arash Kalhor gagged her mouth with his socks but she started struggling. Then Sadegh [Monjazy] laid her on the chest freezer and sat on her. The situation calmed,” one officer is quoted as saying.
The officer said he turned on his phone torch and saw his colleague “[had] put his hand inside her trousers”.
When she fought back, the officers beat her with batons and tasers.
One officer said: “He doesn’t know… who [was doing it], but he could hear… the baton hitting the accused [Nika]… I started to kick and punch but really didn’t know if I was hitting our guys or the accused.”
By the time the driver pulled over, Shakarami was dead. The team called their IRGC handler and were told to “dump her on the street”.
The report concludes that it was Team 12 that killed Shakarami.