Hamid Mahdavi

Hamid Mahdavi (born 1987 / 1366 in Shahrud, Semnan Province) was a 38-year-old Mashhad firefighter, international rugby referee, and social-media presence with tens of thousands of followers. Colleagues and relatives described a man who treated firefighting as a calling, joking, athletic, and quick to volunteer after disasters from the Shahid Rajaee port explosion to floods in Aqqala. He had lost his wife to illness about four years earlier.

On the evening of Thursday, 8 January 2026 (18 Dey 1404), while off duty and returning from training with friends, he went into the Haft-Tir / Vakilabad area of Mashhad to help wounded protesters. A widely shared video shows him in a light hoodie carrying injured protester Jafar Javidi on his shoulders. Moments later he was shot in the neck/throat with live ammunition and killed. Reports say he had already helped move multiple wounded people that night. Hengaw verified his death on Vakilabad Street among civilians killed in Mashhad’s mass crackdown.

Two days before the Dey protests began, his last Instagram post had spoken of a profession that might “intercede” for him before God. He was buried on 22 Dey 1404 (12 January 2026) at Toyeh Darvar cemetery in Damghan County, his maternal hometown, after a large farewell in Mashhad. His father, Habib Mahdavi, later told interviewers that Hamid had always said he would become a martyr, “but not in smoke and fire,” and that people from across Iran came to the burial. Athletes, poets, and cartoonists memorialized him; firefighters in Virginia later held a formal honor ceremony in his name.