Ammon News - AMMONNEWS-Neda Soltani, a lady whose picture was mistakenly confused by media with Neda Agha-Soltan who was shot dead by Iran’s regime forces during the 2009 Iranian election protests, has said the mix-up incident “destroyed” her life.

When the Iranian secret service realized the mix-up incident, they moved in quickly to take advantage of it. They wanted Solatni to pose as the slain Neda Agha-Soltani and claim she was not killed as the media reported.


The mistake made Soltani a living dead, she said. “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’,” Soltani told the Guardian.

“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.

Soltani and some of her family members were interrogated by the secret police. “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.”

Luckily, Soltani had an academic visa that allowed her to escape to Athens before the police can catch her.

Now, Soltani lives in Munich and describes how hard it is to live away from her family for something that was not her fault.

“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,” the Guardian quoted her.

Soltani has recently published a book titled My Stolen Face and dedicated it to the real martyr Neda Agha Soltani.

She dedicated her book "To Neda Agha-Soltan and all other Iranians who sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom and democracy.”






*Al Arabiya