Neda: The face of the new Iranian revolution

Under any normal circumstances recording someone's death is distasteful and putting it on YouTube sickening and immoral. But circumstances in Iran are far from normal at the moment.

Her death seems to have enflamed the feelings of the protestors even more and given them a new figurehead, whilst the authorities of the regime have been waging a battle to keep mourning of her death as quiet as possible to stop her reputation as a martyr from spreading.

What Neda's on screen death has done is give a human face to the suffering that the protesters are facing. Regardless of the politics of the situation, and regardless of whether the election was rigged or not, no one can dispute some of the horrors that people are having to face right now and the start reality of death.

Last week as the mass protests were getting underway it was already well established that seven or eight people had died at the hands of police of Basij. Yet whilst protestors did mourn them, their deaths sparked nowhere near the amount of emotion and reaction that Neda's did.

Neda's death was made all the more shocking by the fact that she did not appear to have done anything to warrant being shot in the heart, other than go to a protest. She was not throwing stones or petrol bombs or fighting with police. If reports are to be believed she simply got out of her car whilst going to a protest and was then shot by a Basiji for no obvious reason.

Her innocence and the horribly bloody footage of her final moments cuts to the heart and allows us to realise that something is wrong here. Her single death is indeed a tragedy of the worst kind.

However while our hearts ache even to think of those graphic last moments of Neda's life, she is not the only person to have died in the protests so far. Seven or eight were reported dead last week, 13-17 were believed to have been killed on Saturday (of which Neda was one) and many others may have been died but have gone unreported.

Every one of these deaths is likely to have been just as bloody and as horrible to watch as Neda's but were not caught on camera and so has not aroused such strong emotions. One of the many Twitterers from Iran talking about the protests said that they had witnessed the death of a ten year old boy from over exposure to tear gas but was unable to film it due to the presence of the Basij.

Perhaps we can be glad they were not able to film it as watching such a scene would be even more horrible than witnessing the death of Neda, but let us remember that every one of those killed in Iran will have died in a way that is every bit as horrible and every bit as tragic as Neda's death.