Kian Pirfalak

Kian Pirfalak (Persian: کیان پیرفلک) was born on 21 Khordad 1392 (11 June 2013) and lived in Izeh, Khuzestan Province. He was a bright, cheerful nine-year-old who loved science and building things, dreamed of becoming a robotics engineer and named Elon Musk as his role model. For the Jaber ibn Hayyan school science festival he built a handmade boat, and the video of his presentation, which he opened with the words "In the name of the God of the rainbow," a line from his third-grade Persian textbook, was seen around the world after his death.

On the evening of Wednesday, 16 November 2022 (25 Aban 1401), during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, Kian was in the family car with his father Meysam Pirfalak, his mother Mahmonir (Zeinab) Molaeirad and his little brother Radin, driving home through Izeh. Near the Red Crescent building, security and plainclothes forces opened fire on the car. Kian was killed and his father was gravely wounded; Meysam was taken to hospital in Ahvaz, spent about two months in hospitals in Ahvaz and Tehran with spinal injuries and infection, and did not learn of his son's death for around forty days. Fearing that the authorities would seize the body, the family kept it at home in bags of ice that night instead of sending it to a morgue.

State media called the shooting a terrorist attack, but at the funeral on Friday, 18 November 2022 (27 Aban 1401), his mother told the crowd that plainclothes agents had sprayed their car with bullets, and her account spread widely and overtook the official version. Thousands of people from Izeh attended the burial in the village of Parchestan Gourouei, chanting against the Islamic Republic and Ali Khamenei. His gravestone carries the words "In the name of the God of the rainbow" and a verse by Saadi. The family kept insisting on the truth at heavy cost: on 11 June 2023 (21 Khordad 1402), at a gathering for what would have been Kian's tenth birthday, Pouya Molaeirad, a cousin of his mother, was shot dead by security forces in Parchestan, where Kian is buried.