More than a month after Neda Aqa-Soltan was killed in the post-election events in Iran, a key witness to the incident moves to set the record straight.
Hamid Panahi, Neda’s friend and music teacher who was by her side in her final moments, dismissed the slew of eyewitness accounts of the sad incident — particularly the one given by Arash Hejazi, press tv reported. Arash Hejazi, an Iranian physician currently studying in England, claimed in an interview with the BBC that he had witnessed a member of the Basij shooting Neda. Panahi said contrary to Hejazi’s account of the incident, ‘there were no security forces of Basij members nearby’….To prove his point, Panahi said that new revelations have found that Neda was in fact shot not in the chest, but in the back.
Iranian security forces have dismissed the reports out of hand, asserting that they did not open fire on protestors during the sporadic unrest. While Media outlets in the West blame Neda’s death on Iranian security forces, new revelations show that she was murdered by a small caliber pistol– a weapon that is not used by Iranian security forces.
