Every revolution needs a hero and the beautiful young woman shot dead by a sniper became the emblem of the struggle to bring democracy to Iran.

The world watched mesmerized as Neda Agha Soltan’s photograph invigorated the opposition movement in the turbulent weeks of June 2009 when Iranians rioted on the streets to overturn presidential election results reformers claimed were rigged.

Soltan was mourned as a martyr at candlelit shrines. Her serene smile went viral as every news organization on the planet broadcast her image in their coverage of the election’s violent aftermath.

Except there was one problem.

The woman in that photograph was not Neda Agha Soltan, the university student murdered by a pro-government militiaman on June 20, 2009. It was Neda Soltani, an English literature professor.

The photo was lifted from Soltani’s Facebook profile. The two women do look similar: the same neat head scarf and pretty features. It was a careless error, a terrible case of mistaken identity.

But it cost Soltani, 35, everything: a successful academic career, a boyfriend she was planning to marry, friends, her home.

“I always say it was like a Kafkaesque story,” she said. “It was a surreal experience. That you cannot believe such a thing can happen.”

She still appeared to be in shock as she recalled the terrifying events that led to her fleeing Iran to save her life, claiming asylum in Germany, and rebuilding a shattered life in New Jersey, where she is a visiting scholar at Montclair State University.

Soltani’s dramatic story began on June 21, 2009. She checked email at her office at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, where she was dean of a college and was surprised to see more than 60 requests of friendship from Facebook users. But she couldn’t log onto the site. The government was restricting Internet access to clamp down on widespread dissent that had broken out since the incumbent candidate President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected on June 12.

Among her emails were still images of a philosophy student at the Islamic Azad University, also named Neda, who was killed the previous day in Tehran. She had stepped out of her car for fresh air and was shot in the chest by a basiji militiaman. The last 40 seconds of her life were captured by one of the thousands of Iranians bearing witness to protests raging a kilometre from where Neda died. The footage was posted on YouTube and went viral.

But Soltani was apolitical. She supported neither the government nor the reformers led by presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. She logged off and went back to the world of 17th- and 18th-century English prose.

She did not realize it at the time, but her image had been lifted from her Facebook profile. Within hours, news organizations, wire agencies, blogs and social network websites were identifying her as the dead woman. Soltani’s phone rang all day but she reassured loved ones that it was just a mix-up.

“Later in the evening when I went home, I turned the TV on to see what was going on and it was now that I saw her (Neda’s) face. But now my photo and that video of her were published together. It was then I realized whom I had been mistaken for.”

Horrified, she logged onto Facebook using anti-censorship software and saw hundreds of messages.

“Somebody — I don’t know who to this day — did their research and just came across my profile and face. Because of the name similarity, I don’t know. I posted on my Facebook that I was alive and it was a misunderstanding and that this photo does not belong to the person they are looking for. I thought this would be the quickest way to inform as many people as I could.”

She and her friends emailed every news organization they could think of.

“They did not respond,” she said. “And they did not react because they kept publishing and broadcasting my photo. It was only Wikipedia that corrected the mistake. They changed the face and the name. Except for them, nobody reacted.”

Soltani found herself caught in the terrifying currents of social media, where every tweet, Facebook post, Flickr image reconfirmed the false story. It didn’t help that Neda Agha Soltan’s family released a correct photograph two days after her death — an eternity in what was dubbed the “Twitter revolution” because activists kept the world informed of the brutal crackdown through social media.

Iran’s reformists seized on the scandal and protesters fighting pro-government forces carried placards with Soltani’s image.

“At the beginning it was just ridiculous. People were crying for me, putting up altars with roses and candles. I saw my face with this black mourning ribbon. It was like sitting there and watching my own funeral. It was ridiculous, it was shocking, it was enraging.”

Then it became sinister. The national intelligence agency summoned her for a meeting on June 25. She was interrogated three times, she said. Was she a CIA agent? An Israeli spy? Or British intelligence?

“The regime was so embarrassed. And at the same time desperate,” she said. “They wanted me to film a video and to tell the story — not the story of what happened to me but the story they wanted me to tell. That I am Neda Soltani, this is my photo, I am alive. I am fine. Which means they wanted me to falsify Neda’s story, so they used this photo to say the whole story is fabricated. And the whole story is Western propaganda.”

Soltani refused. She was threatened with a treason charge, which carries a death sentence.

“They told me that my lack of co-operation was, in fact, a contribution of the Western attack on our Islamic fatherland. They told me, ‘When the national security of our fatherland, when Islam is in danger, the fate of one individual does not count.’ ”

Her life was spinning out of control. She ignored friends’ warnings that she was in danger.

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“I was so scared and I did not want to accept a photo was ruining my whole life, a life that I had really worked hard for.”

Her friends pooled their resources and bought her a flight ticket. Serendipity also played a part. An academic conference was being held in Athens in July. Earlier that year she had been given a Schengen visa, which allows travel throughout the European Union. An official at the airport was bribed to let her on the flight.

The last time she saw her mother, they stared at each other wordlessly.

“I said nothing. I just looked at her. And she looked at me,” she said.

Most painful of all was that her boyfriend refused to speak to her for fear of being tainted by association.

“My career was already established and I was looking forward to marrying my boyfriend and having a family.”

Soltani didn’t attend the Athens conference. From Greece she went to Germany on July 15 and asked for political asylum. The German authorities sent her to a refugee camp north of Frankfurt for nine months while they processed her paperwork.

She lived in a 12-square-metre cell with three other women. To pass the time she taught the alphabet to other refugees.

“In those days it was rewarding because my so-called students were getting something from it. But on the other hand it was so depressing for me. Because I thought this is my life. Going from a university professor, the head of a college with my own academic staff and 1,200 students and then going into a life like that . . . I never thought I’d ever again be the person I was.”

Her life began to turn around when she received a fellowship from the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund — which helps academics whose lives are in danger — to teach in New Jersey. She also wrote a book about her ordeal, My Stolen Face, published in Germany and available in English as an ebook.

“It’s an injustice. I give a large portion of the blame to western media. Everyone knows the Iranian regime and what they have done in the three decades but the western media knowingly exposed me to that danger of the Iranian regime.” Many news organizations eventually corrected the error but it was too late for Soltani.

Yet Soltani says she feels lucky compared with the other refugees she met. Some had been languishing in the camp for a decade.

She is a recognized refugee in Germany and hopeful that her fellowship will be renewed for another year in the U.S.

“There are moments when you think, ‘Why me?’ And there are moments when you think, ‘I can’t take one more step . . . ’

“I tell people I have received so much love from strangers, from people who did not know me at all but opened their arms and took me in. And that’s why I believe in the kindness of human hearts.”

Clarification: The Toronto Star was among those news organizations that published the incorrect photo of Neda Agha Soltan. A Toronto Star article published on Page A3 of the newspaper on June 23, 2009, included the incorrect photo. This article states that Neda Soltani’s friends emailed news organizations to alert them to the 2009 error. The Star has no record of being alerted to that mistake.

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