Neda Agha-Soltan

Agha-Soltan was the middle child and only daughter of a middle-class family of three children, whose family resided in a fourth floor apartment on Meshkini Street in the Tehranpars neighborhood of Tehran. Her father is a civil servant and her mother is a homemaker. She graduated from Islamic Azad University, where she had studied Islamic theology as well as secular philosophies. She was divorced, and according to her mother, had difficulty finding work because how employers perceived her.

Agha-Soltan was an aspiring, underground Persian popular singer and musician, who was studying her craft through private voice and music lessons. She had studied the violin and had an as-yet-undelivered piano on order at the time of her death. She worked for her family's travel agency. Agha-Soltan enjoyed travelling, having saved up money to go on package tours with her friends to Dubai, Thailand and Turkey. She had studied Turkish, hoping it would aid her as a guide for Iranians on foreign tours in Turkey. It was in Turkey, two months prior to her death, that she met her fiancé, 37 year old Caspian Makan, who worked as a photojournalist in Tehran.

Those who knew her maintain that Agha-Soltan had not previously been very political – she had not supported any particular candidate in the 2009 Iran elections – but that anger over the election results prompted her to join the protest. Her voice and music teacher, Hamid Panahi, who was accompanying Agha-Soltan during the protest and can be seen on the video trying to comfort the dying woman, told the media: "She couldn't stand the injustice of it." Panahi went on to state: "All she wanted was the proper vote of the people to be counted. She wanted to show with her presence that, 'I'm here, I also voted, and my vote wasn't counted'. It was a very peaceful act of protest, without any violence."