- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
An Iranian teenager was sexually assaulted and killed by three men working for Iran’s security forces, a leaked document understood to have been written by those forces says.
It has let us map what happened to 16-year-old Nika Shakarami who vanished from an anti-regime protest in 2022.
Her body was found nine days later. The government claimed she killed herself.
We put the report’s allegations to Iran’s government and its Revolutionary Guards. They did not respond.
Marked “Highly Confidential”, the report summarises a hearing on Nika’s case held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) - the security force that defends the country’s Islamic establishment. It includes what it says are the names of her killers and the senior commanders who tried to hide the truth.
I’m not going to say police in the US are flawless but this is horrific stuff, I’ve never heard of US police officers molesting and then beating to death an underage girl who was already bound and gagged. And if evidence of such an event were to come out there would absolutely be consequences. Meanwhile in Iran this shit is institutionalized. The documents show the guards straight up admit to everything happening to their superiors, knowing they won’t face consequences.
Is it awful that my immediate reactive thought was “just give it ten years”?
since in america, police job #1 is covering their own ass (in other words, simply the next step in the iranian system, where the behaviour is tacitly accepted but you’re not supposed to mention it) I wouldn’t be so sure about this. They’re just gangs at this point. American police are apparently so desensitized to death that they can repeatedly hear the complaints of those they suffocate (I mean arrest) and take no action; compassion is not a cognitive process available to these people. You are already there, at the level where police will kill to hide their own crimes, sliding backward into barbarism. There is a distinction of degree, but not of kind. Your police already behave horrifically, and if they are not already doing this, it is only a matter of time. Action must be taken; fucked if I know what, but fortunately, I don’t live there.