As protests over the disputed Iranian presidential election continue into their third day, the New York Times checks in with Ahmad Batebi, a student who became the symbol of anti-government protests in 1999 after a photo of the 21-year-old holding a bloody shirty appeared on the cover of The Economist. After the Economist cover, he was tortured and imprisoned. The magazine caught up with him last year.

During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it. He recalls yearning for a swift death to end the pain. He was played recordings of what he was told was his mother being tortured. His captors wanted him to betray his fellow students, to implicate them in various crimes and to say on television that the blood on that T-shirt was only red paint.

Batebi, now living in Virginia, is both excited and fearful for the demonstrators. He tells the Times, "Every society has to make their own version of freedom and democracy, and that is what the Iranian people are doing right now. But I know that people are being beaten, some are going to jail and some will be killed."