Iran: Director of education confronted by school girls

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Two teenage girls have died while in police custody in Iran, and their bodies returned to their families with severe head wounds, according to local humanitarian reports. Sarina Esmailzadeh, 16, and Nika Shakrami, 17, were both part of protests over the nation last week calling for women’s rights.

News of their deaths comes following that of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16, who was also believed to be beaten to death by the regime’s Guidance Patrol – dubbed the morality police.

The deaths have sparked international condemnation and further outrage toward those fighting for civil liberties under an authoritarian dictatorship.

Amnesty Iran said the country’s authorities had a “harrowing track record of killing children during protests”.

Ms Esmailzadeh died after being hit over the head with a baton by officers at a protest on September 23, Amnesty said.

Security forces at the demonstration in Karaj, a satellite city of the capital Tehran, “severely beat her” including reportedly crushing her skull.

As of October 2, the seventeenth day of the protests, local activist groups said 400 people had been killed and 20,000 arrested.

On Friday, Iran’s security forces finally allowed the family of Ms Shakarami to see her body after nine days – but only part of her face.

She had been demonstrating on Tehran’s main boulevard on September 20 when she went missing.

Her family said that she had called a friend from the protest to tell them that she was running away from armed security officers.

The family searched for Ms Shakarami for over a week but were unable to find her, before eventually being invited to identify her body.

Her aunt, Atash Shakarami, told BBC Persia: “In the morning, when [the police] went to hand over the body, they saw that her nose was destroyed and her skull was broken and disintegrated from multiple blows of a hard object.”

She added: “The cause of Nika’s death was announced as a fall from a height, but according to the pictures shown to them, my brother said that the shape of the body lying on the sidewalk was not normal and it did not seem that he had fallen from a height.”

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Reacting to the deaths, Amnesty, an international human rights group, said: “The Iranian authorities knowingly decided to harm or kill people who took to the streets to express their anger at decades of repression and injustice.

“Amid an epidemic of systemic impunity that has long prevailed in Iran, dozens of men, women and children have been unlawfully killed in the latest round of bloodshed.

The two teenage girls who have died in the past fortnight were participating in protests over the death of Ms Amini, who died in police custody after being detained under draconian hijab rules.

She was arrested by the so-called morality police for failing to wear the head covering – which are mandatory in public spaces for women – and, authorities said, later collapsed and died of a heart attack.

However, eye-witnesses said that Ms Amini had been severely beaten, and leaked audio from a former security commander suggested she had died of brain trauma from a severe beating.

British-Iranian Shappi Khorsandi reacted to her death, saying: “The Iranian regime kills women for trying to live freely. This is not just Iran’s problem, it is the world’s problem.

“Do not look away. This denial of basic human rights is an affront to human dignity. Mahsa Amini cannot speak up anymore.”

On Monday, US President Joe Biden expressed his outrage at Ms Amini’s death, adding that his administration would be imposing further costs on Iranian officials responsible.

In a statement, he said he was “gravely concerned about reports of the intensifying violent crackdown on peaceful protesters in Iran”.

But Ayatollah Ali Khomeini doubled down on his security force’s actions, saying that those who “ignited unrest” deserve “harsh prosecution and punishment”.

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