Thanks to tanith_astlik for pointing me to this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-08/an-iranian-icon-on-todays-protests/

The link goes to an interview with Ahmad Batebi about his role in the 1999 protests and the protests still ongoing in Iran. Here's the beginning of the story:



[Yesterday was] the 10th anniversary of the day Iranians refer to simply as 18 Tir. On that day in 1999, a group of students who had holed up in Tehran University for six days to protest the government’s closure of a major reformist newspaper, Salaam, were savagely attacked by paramilitary forces under orders from the Revolutionary Guard.

The protests were the biggest of their kind since the fall of the shah two decades earlier—though they have been dwarfed by this past month’s protests, which have swept through the whole of the country. The university students had been emboldened by then-President Mohammad Khatami’s reform agenda to demand greater rights, including the right to peaceful assembly and a free press. However, the regime, frightened by the spectacle, saw the student movement as a threat to the stability of the state. In what has now become a familiar sight, the government unleashed the full force of its security apparatus on the students


Early on the morning of 18 Tir—the date according to the Iranian calendar—while most of the students were asleep, Basij forces raided the dorms of Tehran University, indiscriminately beating and arresting people. In the melee, a bullet whizzed by the ear of Ahmad Batebi, a young university student, and lodged itself in the chest of his friend. Batebi took his friend’s shirt off and used it to put pressure on the wound, but to no avail. He then ran to the front of the protests and held the shirt aloft for all to see, a witness to the massacre that had just taken place.

A photographer in the crowd snapped his picture. The next day, the image was splashed across the cover of The Economist and instantly became a symbol of the uprising: It was the lonely Chinese man standing before a phalanx of tanks at Tiananmen Square, or, more perhaps more fittingly, it was Neda Agha-Soltan slowly bleeding to death on the streets of Tehran, blood pouring from her mouth and nose.

The day after Batebi’s picture appeared, the police arrested him. He spent the next 10 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement, in a cell the size of a bathtub. He was repeatedly tortured and forced to undergo a mock execution. The government wanted him to sign a statement saying the blood on the shirt was not blood at all—it was tomato sauce. Batebi refused.