October 14, 2022
The four families are all saying the four women were murdered by the authorities but the regime firmly denies that and is going to extreme efforts to try to convince the public that none of them was killed by the police or Pasdaran.
The youngest woman to die is 16-year-old Sarina Esmail-zadeh. Activists say she was killed in Karaj on September 23 when a group of men attacked her with batons.
Her relatives say they searched for her for 10 days before the authorities handed over her body, which they say was battered. Amnesty International says intelligence agents tyrannized the family members in an effort to silence them. In the end, Sarina’s mother committed suicide by hanging herself, the reports say.
The official news media have reported that young Sarina, who had her own YouTube channel and often dances in her videos without any hair covering, was immoral and a terrorist. They say she was not in police custody when she died, but actually committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a neighbor’s five-story apartment building.
Hossain Fazeli, the chief of the Alborz province Justice Department, said, “The deceased had a history of overdosing on pills in an effort to kill herself.” He also claimed that Sarina’s mother, uncle and a younger brother had all gone to the prosecutor’s office to complain about social media reports claiming she had been killed in the protests.
State broadcasting carried a video showing Sarina’s mother denying Sarina had died in the protest and saying her daughter had a history of attempting suicide. But others are saying the person in the video is not Sarina’s mother.
The mother of another young woman who has died, Nika Shakarami, is also at the center of the dispute over how her daughter died. The authorities say Nika also jumped or fell from a rooftop and died in the impact. But Nika’s mother, Nasrin, told Iran International that account was “ridiculous.” She said, “There is no use talking to the authorities. They bully us and want us to repeat their account of her death.”
Nika’s aunt, Atash Shakarami, told BBC Persian that Nika had called a friend and said she was then being chased by security forces. That was the last the family heard anything of her while she was alive.
Her burial was scheduled for what would have been her 17th birthday.
Nika’s mother said the authorities had called several relatives “saying that if Nika’s mother doesn’t come forward and say the things we want, then we will do this and that and threatened me.” Another death is that of 20-year-old Hadis Najafi, who, according to human rights campaigner Masih Alinejad, was shot six times after stepping to the forefront of a protest in Karaj without wearing a headscarf September 21. A video has been posted supposedly showing her death.