Vahid Heidari
وحید حیدری
2018 · 8 years ago
- Taken
- 5 January 2018
- Age
- 23 years old
- From
- Arak, Markazi
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Vahid Heidari was 23 and single. He came from the village of Takieh near Shazand and lived in Arak, where he was a street vendor, laying out his goods at the entrance to the bazaar alongside the other vendors who gathered there, working through the cold and the heat to make ends meet.
He came from a poor family, with two brothers and three sisters. His father was a disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, and several relatives had been killed in that war. Friends describe an honest, healthy, strongly built young man who worked hard, and they reject the officials' later claims that he used or sold drugs.
How the regime took them
According to his family, police arrested Vahid on 31 December 2017, during the protests, at the bazaar entrance where he had spread out his goods, and took him to Arak's 12th police precinct; officials later gave the date as 1 January. On 5 January 2018 his family was told he was dead.
Officials said he had hanged himself with his clothes and claimed he had been arrested for selling drugs, not for protesting. People who saw his body described a deep fracture on the left side of his skull, as if from a blow with a heavy object. He was buried the next morning in a grave the authorities chose, with police and security agents all around.
