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
Death of Neda Agha-Soltan by bystanders and broadcast over the Internet, and the video became a rallying point for the opposition. Agha-Soltan's death became iconic in the struggle of Iranian protesters against the disputed election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Nedā" (ندا) is a word used in Classic Persian and modern Persian to mean "voice", "calling" (sometimes understood as a "divine message", but this is not the etymological sense of "ندا"), and she has been referred to as the "voice of Iran". Agha-Soltan was the middle child of a middle-class family of three children, whose family resided in a fourth floor flat on Meshkini Street