By Azada Tran
Hanifa Shirzad took her six-and-a-half-year-old daughter by the hand and left home in Tehran on the morning of June 24 to go shopping at Akbarabad market.
It was the last time her husband Rajab Ali Shirzad would see her alive.
The pair had fled from Afghanistan with their daughter shortly after the Taliban seized power in August 2021. Both were members of Afghanistan’s defence forces under the previous government – Hanifa worked as a complaints officer in the Ministry of Defence and Rajab Ali was a solider stationed at Kabul’s international airport.
An anonymous death threat triggered Hanifa and Rajab Ali to act quickly. In a matter of days after Kabul fell on August 15, they left their house to go into hiding. By August 21, they were being smuggled out of Afghanistan to cross the border into Iran.
But on June 24 this year, when Hanifa was attacked in Tehran, there was no warning.
The 28-year-old had received a few death threats by WhatsApp since fleeing Afghanistan but had no means to discover who was behind the messages.
Rajab Ali recounted the story about her attack, as told to him by witnesses.
Hanifa had just gotten off the bus with her daughter at their designated stop when a man appeared with a knife and stabbed Hanifa in front her daughter and bystanders. She was the only one attacked.
Rajab Ali said that catastrophic knife wounds were inflicted on Hanifa’s chest, hand, and neck. She died on the way to the hospital.
The alleged murderer was caught by Iranian security forces and arrested. Rajab Ali said he turned out to be a Pashto-speaking Afghan man.
He remains in prison, but justice is unlikely for Hanifa’s family.
Iran has refused to put the man on trial unless Hanifa’s parents present the case; her husband is not considered the victim of the crime in the eyes of Iran.
But Hanifa’s parents are stuck in Afghanistan, unable to travel.
Who was Hanifa, and why was she murdered?
Hanifa’s mother Sughra, 46, said she raised her daughter under the difficult living conditions in Afghanistan and sent her to school and university with the money she scraped together from her own labor.
Hanifa started working in the Human Resources Department of Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education in 2016 after graduating from school in large part due to her English proficiency, Sughra said.
By 2018, she transferred to the Human Resources Department of the Ministry of Defense.
In addition to her job, Hanifa was studying Law and Political Science at Rabia Balkhi private university in Kabul and was on the cusp of graduating when the Taliban seized Kabul. After that, Hanifa never returned to her job or to study.
After fleeing to Iran, her and Rajab Ali moved to the capital Tehran to look for work.
Keeping a low profile, Rajab Ali took up work at a carpentry factory and Hanifa taught public speaking. Life was hard but they could manage. And early in 2023, to their delight, their second daughter was born.
Rajab Ali said he knew his wife had been threatened with death multiple times in Iran.
“I don’t know the exact details of the threats against my wife. However, she had received death threats from an anonymous person via WhatsApp at least three times, but it didn’t seem very serious to us at the time,” he said.
Sughra said that the night before her daughter’s murder, Hanifa had called her.
“She told me she wanted to move from Tehran to Karaj and would go shopping for household items the next day,” Sughra said.
But there was nothing in Hanifa’s reasoning that seemed motivated by fear.
A distraught husband desperate for justice
Hanifa’s murder is deeply suspicious and doesn’t seem random, however there is little direct evidence to determine whether it was in some way revenge or indeed if it was connected to the Taliban and Hanifa’s time at the Ministry of Defence.
Iran is not investigating the matter and the Iranian courts have not allowed Rajab Ali to pursue the case.
He said Tehran has ruled that only Hanifa’s parents are permitted to follow up on the case.
In a written document reviewed by Rukhshana Media, it states that the retribution for the murder is contingent upon the presence of the victim’s parents.
Rajab Ali said he has visited the Tehran court multiple times since Hanifa’s murder, but no institution or authority has been willing to listen to him.
The court has told him that if he wants the murderer of his wife to be executed, he must pay 300 million tomans ($720) for a gallows.
However, he said that he does not have the financial means to take the case to court.
After Rajab Ali was contacted by the hospital to inform him of his wife’s death on June 24, it took three days to receive his wife’s body. He had to pay the hospital a fee of three million tomans (US$100) and then another seven and a half million tomans (US$250) dollars in total for its services and to receive his wife’s body.
Another two million tomans ($60) were spent on her burial.
Most of this money was already borrowed from friends because his income only brings in enough to cover the family’s daily living expenses.
These days he hasn’t been earning an income as he stopped work to care for his children.
He said his elder daughter, who witnessed her mother’s murder, is still in shock, and the baby is only one-and-a-half years old with no one to take care of her full time.
A mother suffers on the other side of the border
The day after speaking to Hanifa about her plans to move to Karaj and go shopping at the market, Sughra received a call from relatives.
“While I was preparing sweets for Eid, our relatives in Iran called to inform me that my daughter had been injured,” she said.
Before long, Sughra’s relatives gathered at her home to deliver the news of Hanifa’s death.
Sughra is the breadwinner as her husband has a disability.
She works as a clothes vendor in western Kabul from morning to sunset. And at night, she sews the clothes which she sells in the street during the day.
Sughra said they simply do not have the funds for a visa to go to Iran to help prosecute the case against their daughter’s murderer.
Her and her husband were only able to obtain a passport with borrowed money, but they have not been able to secure the funds for the visa or the travel required.
And even once they arrive, Sughra said it’s unlikely they would be able to afford the court costs.
A brutal murder likely to remain a mystery
None of Hanifa’s family know who is the man being held for her murder or who he is connected to.
Speculation about whether Hanifa could have been attacked for her time in the Ministry of Defence abounds with fears that the Taliban’s reach extends beyond Afghanistan.
According to news reports, the Taliban has previously attempted to abduct one of their critics from Iran.
Political activist Qari Isa Mohammadi was targeted by the Taliban while living in Iran before he flew to Germany.
According to reports by Independent Persian citing their sources, three Taliban diplomats in Mashhad – Anwar Nabil, Mawlawi Samim, and Habib-ur-Rahman Atayi – had planned to abduct Mr Mohammadi and take him to Kandahar.
The Taliban plot ultimately failed, but its presence in Iran is growing.
The Afghan embassy in Tehran has been handed over to the Taliban.
For Hanifa’s family, there’s no support for their case from the Taliban or Iran alike.
Rajab Ali said that with the lack of political will or sense of justice from authorities to pursue the case, it would require a substantial amount of money to be paid to the Iranian government and courts for the case to move ahead.
