Hassan Draoftadeh, the father of a 16-year-old boy who was killed last month in the western Iranian city of Piranshahr, says that security agents summoned him and pressured him to say his son was killed by Kurdish groups and not by the Iranian government.
In an interview with RFERL’s Radio Farda, Kumar Daroftadeh's father said that the security agents asked him to say something he just couldn't.
"The government killed my son and must be held accountable. I told them, if Kurdish groups killed him, why did you steal his body and why did you have his cell phone?” he said.
"In no world and under any law, a 16-year-old child will not be shot."
Daroftadeh described his son as a martyr of freedom at his funeral on October 31 in the Kurdish-Iranian city of Piranshahr.
He told Radio Farda that his son was shot at close range while he was standing in the street with two other friends.
"The forensic doctor said that they shot him from a meter away," he added.
Anger over the death of Mahsa Amini has prompted thousands of Iranians to take to the streets to demand more freedoms and women's rights in the biggest threat to the Islamic government since the 1979 revolution.
The 22-year-old died on September 16, three days after being detained in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly breaching Iran's strict rules on head scarves.
The protests started in Amini’s hometown of Saghez in Iran's Kurdistan region and spread to dozens of cities and towns across Iran. Tehran has accused, without providing evidence, that Kurdish groups in northern Iraq have been supporting the demonstrations.
The wave of protests and the brutal government crackdown that followed Amini's death have left scores of demonstrators dead and seen thousands detained.