Mohammad Mehdi (Mahan) Mardani Garsadafi

Mohammad Mahdi Mardani, known as Mahan, was born on May 15, 2002 (25 Ordibehesht 1381). He was originally from Qasr-e Shirin in Kermanshah province and lived with his family in Shahr-e Qods (Qaleh Hassan Khan), west of Tehran. He attended a school for gifted students. At 23 he was a master’s student in industrial management at Shahrood University of Technology. He was the goalkeeper of the university futsal team, with university-level titles, and also coached football and worked at the dormitory snack bar. Friends knew him as cheerful and stubborn, and as a friend to stray cats. He once made a splint for an injured orange campus cat that students called “Mahan’s chubby cat.” When dormitories were evacuated on January 8, 2026, he returned home and joined the protests. That night he saw three people shot beside him. On the evening of January 9, at around 9:30 p.m., he heard gunfire and ran to the street, where he confronted security forces who had surrounded several women protesters. When the shooting began he ran back toward his home and was shot twice in the right thigh at the closed front door. A neighbor who was a nurse tried to stop the bleeding from the main artery. He was taken to a local clinic and then to Fayyazbakhsh Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. on January 10, nearly three hours after he was shot. His body was later taken to Kahrizak, where his family searched for body number 12391. According to his family, officials demanded a large sum of money for the bullets and released his body only after his father pledged to stay silent. He was buried under security presence at the Emamzadeh Hazratein cemetery in Shahr-e Qods, with only about ten relatives allowed to attend. Before his death, he had written on Telegram that even if only one of us remains, that person has a duty to tell the story.