Source: Rudaw
by Fazel Hawremy
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iranian authorities forced the family of a teenager, who was killed by security forces during anti-government protests in the northwest of the country to say that he died of an infection after being bitten by a dog, his mother revealed in an exclusive interview three months after the killing.
Kurdistan Human Rights Network (KHRN), a watchdog that covers human rights violations in the Kurdish areas in western Iran (Rojhelat) obtained a video interview with Parvin Shafaqdoost, the mother of 17-year-old Nima (Aslan) Shafaqdoost who was wounded during a protest on September 21 in the Islamabad neighbourhood of Urmia city.
The incident happened five days after protests broke out across Iran following the death of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini at the hands of the Tehran morality police for allegedly not wearing her headscarf appropriately.
Nima was wounded after he was shot twice in both legs and when the family rushed him to a nearby hospital, they realized that security forces had surrounded the medical facility. The family had to make a life and death decision, choosing to take him to the surgery of a doctor and then for 12 days to be treated at home by the doctor.
Nima was an apprentice at a restaurant in Urmia and had turned 17 only nine days prior. He had only been to primary school.
The medical facility where he was taken was called Imam Khomeini hospital, named after the founder of the Islamic Republic, which Nima and tens of thousands of mostly teenagers and young men and women have chosen to challenge in the aftermath of Amini’s death.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its hated militia, Basij, have been deployed to the streets of the country to quash the protests like on previous occasions when thousands of protesters were gunned down.
But the authorities soon realized that the threat this time was serious as the Iranians from all religious and ethnic backgrounds were united to topple the regime. The IRGC and Basij would have no mercy on anyone, not even on wounded teenagers like Nima.
Hundreds of protesters wounded in the demonstrations were detained at different medical facilities across the country in the early weeks of the unrest and taken to detention centres, pushing many families to opt to treat their wounded at home and in secret to avoid arrest.
But by October 4, the family realized that if Nima were to survive, he would need urgent professional care in a hospital. The family rushed him to the Imam Khomeini hospital, but the infection had spread into his body, and he died shortly afterwards.
KHRN and other human rights organizations reported at the time that he was killed during the protests by the security forces. But soon, the authorities said that his death was not related to the protest.
“Based on our investigation, the person mentioned was bitten by a dog three weeks ago,” Colonel Hassan Sheikhnejad, the head of Urmia police, told Iranian state media at the time.” He was then taken to a hospital, but the family decided to take him home and treat him there but sadly, he died because of the severity of the infection.”
Then, the family appeared in a report by a local state TV channel and confirmed that Nima was bitten by a dog.
Now, Nima’s mother has broken her silence and has revealed what really happened to her teenage son.
“It was the 4th of October, and Nima’s condition deteriorated, and we put him in a vehicle and took him to the hospital; he died after half an hour in the hospital,” Parvin said in an interview obtained by the KHRN while holding her son’s photo. “They did not give us the corpse and said they needed to take it to the pathologist.”
Two days later, the body was given back to the family, and they buried him.
“It was 12 at night, and they called us from the intelligence office and said, ‘you should not hold the ceremony for this young man, and if you do, we will come and take your other young men away, and we do to them what we did to Nima’.”
When the report from the pathologist came back, the family tried to take the legal route and obtain justice for Nima in silence without telling the outside world what had happened to him. By this time, the number of dead protesters were piling up as the security forces took no chances and used everything at their disposal to end the protests. The court stated that Nima Shafaqdoost died of natural causes. However, the official document issued by the Urmia notary office said that the cause of death is “unknown.”
“Then four to five armed persons came to our house, they threatened us to give interviews to say that Nima was bitten by a dog.”
The authorities in Tehran have tried hard to present different versions of events in the cases of many dead protesters from Zhina Amini to Nika Shakarami and Aylar Haghi and many others, through fear and intimidation.
But as protests continue in Iran, many families have decided to tell the world how the Islamic Republic and its security and intelligence forces are seeking to change the facts sometimes by forcing a mother to lie about her dead teenage son.
Five hundred sixteen protesters and bystanders have been killed by Iranian security forces as of Monday since the start of the protests, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), 70 of which are children, including 17-year-old Nima.
“I swear on the soul of my martyred son that I am telling the truth,” Parvin said at the end of the short video interview as she sat on a sofa surrounded by three posters of her son.
