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From The Times, November 13, 2009, Martin Fletcher<\/a><\/div>\n

As Arash Hejazi sat in an Oxford coffee bar, members of Iran\u2019s Basij militia in Tehran were demanding his extradition outside the British Embassy.<\/p>\n

The previous day the Iranian regime had sent an Oxford college a letter of protest over a scholarship given to honour Neda Soltan, the student killed during a huge demonstration against electoral fraud in Tehran in June. The letter also suggested that Dr Hejazi was responsible for her murder.<\/p>\n

For Dr Hejazi, who had tried to save Ms Soltan\u2019s life, that was the final straw. He decided that it was time to speak out. It was time to reveal how the regime has sought to vilify, punish and silence him ever since he told the world, immediately after Ms Soltan\u2019s death, how she had been shot by a government henchman for peacefully protesting against President Ahmadinejad\u2019s disputed re-election.<\/p>\n

Dr Hejazi is now living in exile in Britain, jobless and fearful, while back in Tehran the regime blackens his name and hounds his friends, family and colleagues. \u201cI told the truth. I just did what I had to do, but there were dire consequences,\u201d he told The Times. In short, a quirk of fate \u2014 that he happened to be standing near Ms Soltan the moment that she was shot \u2014 has turned his entire life upside down and made him \u201canother victim of tyranny\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dr Hejazi, 38, was doing a one-year postgraduate course in publishing at Oxford Brookes University at the time of the June 12 presidential election, and returned to Tehran on a business trip the following day. On June 20 he was caught up in a street protest when he heard a blast, looked around and saw blood gushing from the chest of the woman next to him.<\/p>\n

She collapsed. Dr Hejazi, who had trained as a doctor before switching to publishing, tried in vain to save her life. Within hours a video clip of that scene had flashed around the world, transforming Ms Soltan into a symbol of the regime\u2019s brutality and of the Iranian people\u2019s battle for freedom.<\/p>\n

So powerful were the pictures that Dr Hejazi, realising that the regime would try to suppress the truth, fled back to his wife and infant son in Britain. A few days later, in interviews with The Times<\/em> and the BBC, he told how Ms Soltan was shot by a Basiji on a motorbike who was swiftly caught by other demonstrators.<\/p>\n

Dr Hejazi\u2019s troubles began almost immediately. His father, a university professor, was interrogated for hours and ordered to tell his son to shut up. Senior officials in the regime asserted that Ms Soltan had been killed by foreign intelligence agencies, and that Dr Hejazi was part of an international conspiracy to undermine the Islamic republic. He was denounced in the state-controlled media. Iran\u2019s police chief declared him a wanted man.<\/p>\n

Although Dr Hejazi received thousands of e-mails praising his courage in speaking out, supporters of the regime threatened to kill him, and called him a murderer, a spy and Ms Soltan\u2019s pimp. Oxford police installed alarms and a hotline in his two-bedroom rented house on the edge of the city but he still does not feel entirely safe. He opens his door with caution, and asks that his wife\u2019s name not be published. \u201cI worry for my security,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In Tehran the regime is exacting revenge on Caravan Books, the publishing house that Dr Hejazi co-founded and which employs 22 people. It has used Iran\u2019s censorship laws to ban the publisher\u2019s books and forbidden banks from giving it loans, even after Dr Hejazi resigned as editorial director. \u201cThey are trying to close the company down,\u201d he says. He believes that the regime is pursuing him not just because he has seriously embarrassed it \u2014 \u201ca lot of the pressure is to discourage others from speaking out\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dr Hejazi\u2019s course ended in September but returning to Iran is obviously now impossible. \u201cI would be arrested at the airport,\u201d he said. He would join hundreds of other political prisoners who have been beaten, raped and tortured in the past five months. \u201cI can be considered an exile.\u201d He has been searching for a publishing job in Britain, however menial, but in vain. His wife has lost her post as a finance manager in a large Iranian company, and they are living on money borrowed from friends. \u201cI can\u2019t see my family. I\u2019ve lost my job and my career. I don\u2019t know how to sustain myself,\u201d he said, laughing at the regime\u2019s charge that he was an agent of foreign intelligence services. If he were, he said, he would not be living as he was.<\/p>\n

While the regime makes Dr Hejazi and his family suffer, it has does nothing to punish the Basiji who shot Ms Soltan and was quickly identified by the demonstrators who caught him.<\/p>\n

Dr Hejazi does not regret what he did and insists that he would do exactly the same again. He believes that he helped to expose the true nature of an evil government. \u201cTotalitarian regimes always want to cover up their violence and terror, but evidence always surfaces to show the world what is really happening,\u201d he said. He is proud that he rose to the challenge. \u201cIn every person\u2019s life there are moments of truth that determine the sort of person you are, that test your beliefs and values. For me Neda\u2019s death and speaking out was that moment, and I think I\u2019ve been true to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the rest of his life, however, Dr Hejazi will be haunted by the memory of the young woman\u2019s face, her struggle to ask the question \u201cwhy\u201d, as her life ebbed away on that pavement.<\/p>\n

He still suffers flashbacks. \u201cAs a doctor I\u2019ve seen death many times,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Neda\u2019s innocence, the injustice of her death, and her gaze before she passed away mean I can never heal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Times, November 13, 2009, Martin Fletcher As Arash Hejazi sat in an Oxford coffee bar, members of Iran\u2019s Basij militia in Tehran were demanding his extradition outside the British Embassy. The previous day the Iranian regime had sent an Oxford college a letter of protest over a scholarship given to honour Neda Soltan, the student killed during a...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":28,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/813"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":814,"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/813\/revisions\/814"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.arashhejazi.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}