During mass protests contesting Iran's presidential election results, Neda Agha-Soltan was shot in the chest near a demonstration in Tehran. A bystander filmed her final moments on a mobile phone; the footage spread across the internet within hours, turning her into an instant global symbol of the Iranian opposition movement's brutal suppression.
Neda Agha-Soltan was not a political organizer. She had stepped out of a car stuck in traffic near a protest against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, curious about the commotion, when a single bullet, fired from a rooftop by a member of the Basij militia according to witnesses, struck her in the chest.
A doctor who had also been attending the protest rushed to her side and tried desperately to stop the bleeding, and a bystander recorded the entire scene, roughly forty seconds, on a cellphone camera. Within hours the footage traveled from Tehran to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and from there to television networks across the world, an early and searing example of citizen video overpowering a government's attempt to control the narrative through censored state media.
Iran's government blamed foreign agents and the BBC, and briefly detained the doctor who tried to save her. But "Neda" (Persian for "voice" or "calling") became a rallying name for the Green Movement, invoked at protests and vigils around the world, and her death remains one of the starkest illustrations of how a single smartphone recording can outlast a regime's official version of events.
Key people: Neda Agha-Soltan