Khodanur Lojei: Non-Believer, Because of You

Khodanur Lojei was twenty-seven, Baluch and Sunni, from Shirabad — an impoverished district on the edge of Zahedan, in Sistan and Baluchestan, Iran's poorest province. His father was named Issa; his mother Sanoubar. Locally he was known as Yaghi — the rebel — a name his own community used affectionately and the Zahedan prosecutor later used against him.

He had no identity papers. Statelessness of this kind is widespread among Iranian Baluch, and it matters enormously to what happened afterwards, because it is what allowed the state to claim he was Afghan. What he was known for was dancing — a substantial Instagram following built on dance and music videos.

## The flagpole

In July 2022, military and security forces entered Shirabad and took him. At some point in that detention he was bound to a flagpole, head down on his knees, with a cup of water placed on a ledge just out of his reach. Someone photographed it.

The reason he was taken is disputed. The state said armed robbery; his family said it was a personal dispute with a man connected to the Basij. He was released on bail after about a month — a detail hard to reconcile with the robbery charge.

One correction has to be made here, because it is the most widely repeated error about him: the photograph does not document his death. It was taken in July, months earlier. It only began to circulate at scale in late October and early November 2022, after he had been killed — which is why so many people who shared it believed they were looking at the moment he died. They were looking at an act of humiliation he survived.

## Bloody Friday, and the day after

On Friday 30 September 2022, Zahedan saw the single deadliest episode of the year — triggered locally by the alleged rape of a fifteen-year-old Baluch girl by a police chief, on top of the death of Mahsa Jina Amini a fortnight earlier. Security forces opened fire with live ammunition, metal pellets and tear gas on worshippers and protesters alike, including inside the Great Mosalla itself.

Death tolls diverge sharply and should never be averaged: the Iranian government said nineteen, later thirty-five; Human Rights Watch verified at least twelve; Amnesty International put it at eighty, including thirteen named children; the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center documented at least ninety-three; the UN Fact-Finding Mission put it above a hundred killed and 350 injured.

Khodanur Lojei was not shot on the Friday. According to a witness interviewed by Human Rights Watch, on 1 October armed men who appeared to be security forces opened fire on six young men passing near a mosque in Shirabad and wounded him. He died the following night in a Zahedan hospital. His family say he was taken to a hospital under IRGC supervision and that surgery was withheld from him: "They neglected him to death and we could do nothing."

## What is established

- He was a Baluch, Sunni man from the Shirabad neighbourhood of Zahedan, aged 27. - He was shot by Iranian security forces in Shirabad during the crackdown around Bloody Friday and died of his wounds in a Zahedan hospital in early October 2022. - A photograph of him bound to a flagpole with water out of reach, taken during a July 2022 detention, circulated worldwide after his death and became an international protest symbol. - Bloody Friday was 30 September 2022; tolls range from an official 19–35 to 107 in independent documentation, including 13–17 children. - Re-enacting his pose became a widespread protest gesture, from Tabriz to Los Angeles to Berlin. No senior official has been held accountable for the Zahedan killings.

## What is disputed, or not established

- He did not die on his birthday — this is widely repeated but not established; no organisation reports his date of birth, and he had no identity documents. - The exact date of death (1, 2 or 3 October, depending on the source). - The exact wound — variously reported as the kidney, the back, or near the spinal cord. - His nationality — the state claimed he was Afghan; his family and every human rights body treat him as an Iranian Baluch. - Whether he was in a protest crowd or simply walking past a mosque when he was shot. - The withholding of surgery rests on family testimony relayed by secondary sources and is not corroborated by Amnesty, HRW or the UN.

## After

His silhouette became a language. Art students at the Tabriz University of Islamic Arts replicated the pose as a performance; footballers struck it after scoring; there were solidarity re-enactments from Los Angeles to Berlin to the foot of the Azadi Tower in Tehran.

His family have not fared well. A twenty-one-year-old sister is reported to have died of grief in the months after his killing. Halvash reported in April 2025 that his father Issa had died of cardiac arrest. IranWire's Persian headline carried the answer many Bloody Friday families gave when pressed to accept blood money: *we will not take blood money, and we will not forget your crime.*

---

*Documented by Human Rights Watch, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Amnesty International and the International Crisis Group. This record separates what independent sources establish from what is contested or unknown. Corrections and additional documentation are welcome at pulsepersia.com/contact.*