The doctor who tended Neda Soltan, the girl whose death on a street in Tehran shocked the world, broke his silence last night after fleeing Iran for the safety of his home in Britain.

In an interview with The Times, Arash Hejazi said that the young woman’s death would haunt him for ever, but he was glad that she had become a global symbol of the Iranian regime’s brutality towards its people. “This way her blood is not wasted and she did not die in vain,” he said.

Dr Hejazi told of the moment that the 26-year-old music student was shot by a government militiaman: “I looked at Neda. She was just standing there, blood gushing out of her chest.”

As she lay dying, he recalled: “I felt she was trying to ask a question. Why?”

The 38-year-old Iranian described how, as a video clip of her death sped around the world and turned her into a martyr for freedom, he realised that his own life was in danger as the regime fought to suppress the story.

On Tuesday he e-mailed his friend, the novelist Paulo Coelho, to say that he hoped to join his family in Oxford, where he is studying: “If something happens to me, please take care of [my wife and son], they are there alone.”

Dr Hejazi made it. He accepts that he may never return to his homeland, but said he owed it to Miss Soltan to speak out: “She was everything this movement was about. She was just a person in the street who was against the injustice going on in her country, and for that she was murdered.”

He denied the regime’s claims that she was shot by a fellow demonstrator and accused President Ahmadinejad of mounting a coup d’etat after losing the election.

Yesterday, Mr Ahmadinejad seized on President Obama’s criticism of the Iranian crackdown to dash hopes of improved relations between the two old enemies: “Do you want to speak with this tone? If that’s your stance, then what is left to talk about?”

Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated candidate, is fighting on despite pressure to abandon calls for a fresh election. “I won’t refrain from securing the rights of the Iranian people,” he said.

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