Neda Agha-Soltan Graduate Scholarship the country the status of "international basket case". While the problems of Iran were no longer front-page news, it said, they still existed. In the circumstances, the editorial concluded, "A scholarship at The Queen’s College in memory of Neda Soltan is, indeed, politically motivated, and admirably so". UK diplomatic sources, speaking anonymously to "The Times", said that if the government had been asked, it would have advised against the creation of the scholarship, because Iran would see it as an act of provocation, and because it would interfere with efforts to free Iranians working for the British Embassy in Tehran
Mammad agha Shahtakhtinski Mammad agha Shahtakhtinski Mammad agha Mammad Taghi Soltan oglu Shahtakhtinski () (1846, Erivan – 1931, Baku) was an Azerbaijani linguist and public figure. Shahtakhtinski was born into an Azeri family living in Erivan (present-day Yerevan). He was raised Muslim and attended a religious school as a child. In 1869 he graduated from the University of Leipzig with a degree in philosophy, history and law. In 1873, he enrolled in courses at the École des langues orientales but was forced to return to Russia in 1875, after his father's death. Until the early 1890s he worked as a journalist publishing articles