This article titled “Iranian fugitive: identity mix-up with shot Neda wrecked my life” was written by Tracy McVeigh, for The Observer on Saturday 13th October 2012 23.07 UTCHer face adorned a thousand placards and posters, an emblem of the failed Iranian uprising. The photograph of Neda Agha Soltan, who was shot dead on a Tehran street by a government sniper during the anti-regime demonstrations in 2009, was used in television broadcasts, web pages and newspapers all around the world. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her.
As 26-year-old Neda bled to death on the pavement, her shocked eyes stared into an onlooker’s mobile phone video camera and the terrible images were uploaded to international websites. It made her a martyr to those inside and outside Iran protesting at the flawed election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Scrambling to cover the story and looking to find a photograph of the dead woman in life, journalists who had been banned at the time from entering Iran lifted a photograph of a woman called Neda Soltani from her Facebook page and published it – and the life of the 32-year-old, middle-class university English lecturer changed for ever.
“It destroyed my life,” said Soltani, who has now written a book called My Stolen Face and still has to endure her image appearing as if she were the murdered Neda Soltan.
Soltan’s death galvanised the uprising as the Iranian authorities were desperately trying to contain it. Mosques were banned from praying for her and tear gas dispersed crowds of protesters who gathered around makeshift shrines. Her fiancé fled the country and her family were threatened.
For Soltani, the mix-up brought her to the attention of the Iranian secret service. “They wanted to use me to say the whole thing was a fake made up by western media – ‘see, here is this Neda and she is alive’. They didn’t care that it was nothing to do with me, that it was a mistake; they wanted me to co-operate and when I wouldn’t, they hounded me,” she said.
“I was interrogated three times and confronted with increasingly wild theories. They were threatening me and my brother and my mother. They charged me with treason. They said I was endangering the security of my own country. I knew what that meant: death.
“In a matter of 12 days, everything in my life had changed. From the day Neda was killed to the day I fled.
“My family were so shocked to see people everywhere carrying my photo, decorating it with black ribbons and flowers. Neda’s own family were in shock and it was some time before they released her real photo and by then it was too late; the world had mine.”
Luckily, Soltani had an exit visa in her passport, obtained for an academic conference she had been due to attend in Athens. Her friends bundled her out of the country just hours before the soldiers came for her. “I owe them my life because I was still so shocked, I didn’t really know what was happening.”
For nine months she lived in a refugee camp in Germany, a soulless, depressing existence. “Every day in such a place is torture, not just for me but for all those refugees. Some had been there for 10 years. You give up on your own destiny. You have to submit to whatever the system decrees. In my society I had achieved so much and now I had nothing – I was in a drawer, a folder labelled ‘refugee’.”
Finally she was granted leave to stay and is now, slowly, trying to adjust to the culture, learn the language and build herself another life in Munich.
“It’s hard. My friends have got married and had babies and I can never be there. My grandmother passed away, my brother graduated. Sometimes just the smallest thing, a smell, a certain moment, will bring back memories of home.
“I considered myself a good citizen, trying to play a positive part in society, but even a normal citizen can get into such trouble within a dictatorship.
“I am angry because it was amateurish and reckless. It shows how dangerous sloppy journalism can be. I had an apology a long time later from a news agency. It said: ‘We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.'”
My Stolen Face, by Neda Soltani, is available on amazon.com as a digital book.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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