Nothing about Zahra Baniyaghoub's life suggested she would have wanted to end it. With a flourishing career as a doctor and a stable relationship with a man she loved, she seemed to have everything to live for.

But when she died suddenly in the custody of Iran's morals and virtues police - an organisation empowered by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to enforce Islamic behavioural standards - officials reported it as suicide.

Now Baniyaghoub's family are insisting her death was suspicious and have engaged the country's most famous human rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel peace prize winner, in an effort to prove she was murdered.

Baniyaghoub's ordeal started on the morning of October 12 while sitting with her fiancé, Hamid Chitsaz, in a park in the western city of Hamedan. Officers arrested the couple because they were not legally related and not entitled to be alone together under Islamic law.

Such treatment must have been galling for such a highly qualified couple. Baniyaghoub, 27, a graduate of Tehran University's elite medical school, was a GP in a remote village in one of Iran's poorest regions and had ambitions to qualify as a heart specialist or urologist. Her fiancé worked as a radio presenter with the state broadcaster IRIB. Nevertheless, they were sent before an Islamic judge who ordered their detention.

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