Photo: BBC Persian · Hengaw
Davood Soltani Helisadi
داوود سلطانی هلیسادی
2026
- Taken
- 8 January 2026 (Sources differ)
- Age
- 38 years old
- From
- Isfahan, Isfahan
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Davood came from the Helisadi clan of the Bakhtiari Lors and moved to Isfahan with his family at about 11. His father had fought in the Iran-Iraq war. He taught at the Shariati primary school in Khorzuq, Isfahan, and was the father of three-year-old triplets. In June 2025 he lost his younger sister to illness.
He was a sharp critic of the country's political and economic state and had been detained in the 2019 protests and released after signing an undertaking. Friends remember a selfless, funny man with a fine voice whose singing they loved; he was the warmth of every gathering. His dream, they say, was a free Iran that could grow and flourish.
How the regime took them
Davood joined the protest in his own neighbourhood, on the Third Robat street in Isfahan's Malekshahr. Witnesses told his family that to the last he was helping the wounded and moving them to safe houses. The mother of one wounded boy wrote that he carried her son on his shoulders to his car to take him to a clinic, and when the boy said he was cold, put his own jacket over him, with his phone in the pocket; that is how her family later learned what he had done. Then he was shot in the side with a live round.
His body was handed over after a week; the regime tried to present him as a Basij member killed by protesters. In the end, so that his children would receive their full support, the family accepted the state foundation's registration of him among its own dead. He is buried beside his sister in Shahinshahr. (Hengaw and Iran Human Rights date his death to 8 January; BBC Persian gives 9 January.)
