WHEN the order came to return to prison, the Iranian dissident had no time to lose. Ahmad Batebi’s body had already been broken by torture after eight years of a 15-year prison sentence. He had been beaten with metal cables, suspended by his arms from the ceiling and taunted with mock execution and had had his head dunked in excrement until he was suffocating.

Batebi fled the country with the help of a Kurdish underground movement, which led him over mountains and minefields across the border into Iraq. Last month he was granted refuge in America and is still coming to terms with his strange new freedom.

“It is as if I’ve been hit by a huge wave and I won’t know where the earth begins and the sky ends until I’ve reached the shore,” he said.

Batebi, 31, became an icon after he was photographed as a handsome young student waving the blood-stained shirt of a fallen demonstrator during mass protests against Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, and clerical rule in 1999. With his long hair and bandana, he embodied the new spirit of defiance in Iran.

His hair is still long and in a ponytail, the cause of some tut-tutting among the more conservative Iranian exiles. The New York Times recently called him Iran’s Johnny Depp. But the power of his image has been his blessing and curse ever since the photograph appeared on the front page of The Economist nearly a decade ago under the headline “Iran’s second revolution?”.

Batebi did not know of the picture’s existence until he was dragged to court for “creating street unrest” and the judge slapped the magazine in front of him. “You would have received a long sentence but because of this you will be put to death,” the judge thundered. The sentence was commuted to 15 years after an international outcry. Batebi describes himself as a human rights activist, not a political activist.

As the West ponders how to curb Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology and sponsorship of terrorism — whether through diplomacy, isolation or military action — he wants the thousands of dissidents who are still suffering in prison to be remembered.

Even as he fled, the Iranian secret police pursued him all the way to Erbil in Iraq, he said. His chief interrogator at the notorious Evin jail in Tehran managed to reach Batebi on the secret number of his mobile phone, provided by the United Nations. “We know where you are,” the interrogator warned. “You must turn yourself in.”

After arriving in Washington, Batebi, a photographer, took a picture of his outstretched hand in front of the White House and posted it on his Yahoo! blog with the taunt: “Your hands will never touch me again.”

According to Batebi, he witnessed the stoning to death of an adulterer by Iranian Revolutionary Guards when he was nine. The man was buried to the waist and his head was covered with a sack that turned blood-red as blocks of concrete were thrown at him.

“It was a defining moment for me,” Batebi said through an interpreter, Lily Mazahery, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist in Washington who helped to bring him to America. “It made me despise man-made religious laws and people who want to use Islam to oppress others.”

The price of his defiance can be seen in the deep scars on his shoulders and arms — and other parts of his body hidden by clothing. In prison he was repeatedly blindfolded, beaten and deprived of sleep. Pulling up the sleeves of his T-shirt, he said: “I don’t know what they used to cut me, but they put salt in the wounds to stop me falling asleep.”

Batebi, who is tall and still muscular, smiled sadly: “I used to be an athlete, but my body is in ruins. It is being held together by bits and pieces.”

In prison he suffered kidney damage, ulcers and impaired vision. He was temporarily released last year for medical treatment after suffering a partial stroke, which left him without feeling on one side of his body. The authorities feared he might die in prison, an idea Batebi had grown used to over the years.

After the judge had pronounced the death sentence, his father saved him from despair. He smiled wryly at his son, patted him on the shoulder and said: “You’re not scared are you, my boy?”

“It gave me an extraordinary surge of energy,” Batebi said. “My primary fear had been for my family. After that I didn’t have any more concerns.”

He spent nearly two years in solitary confinement. His interrogators wanted him to beg for a pardon on television, but he refused.

“I wish each and every Iranian could travel abroad, come to the US or go to Europe for just one week, and feel, smell and breathe freedom, human dignity, and realise the value of their lives,” he told Voice of America radio on his arrival.

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