The protester was speeding toward a demonstration in Tehran on his motorbike when an Iranian security officer standing 10 feet away raised his gun and shot a rubber bullet into his left eye.
“We locked eyes and then everything went dark,” said the protester, who goes by the nickname Saman. He cupped his hand to his mutilated eye, afraid that it would drop from its socket, as he drove himself to a hospital where doctors refused to treat him, he said. He was finally admitted to the government-run Farabi Eye Hospital, where he was operated on nearly 24 hours after he had been shot.
Saman, 30, spoke by telephone from a location outside Iran where he fled last month. The New York Times is withholding his name and location as a security precaution.
The officer who aimed at his face, he said, had recognized him as one of the frontline activists who had gone night after night to Valiasr Square in Tehran, Iran’s capital, to face off against security forces, hurling back the tear gas canisters they fired into the crowd.
“He knew my face, and I knew his,” he said.
The impact of the shot, fired at such close range, left him blind in that eye. He provided medical documents and photographs of CT scans of his eye, which The Times asked two ophthalmologists to review. They confirmed that it had been irreparably damaged. » | Cora Engelbrecht | Saturday, November 19, 2022
