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Society & Culture

“It’s like losing your sister”

May 18, 2015
Shima Shahrabi
5 min read
“It’s like losing your sister”
Maliheh and family filed a complaint with the Law Enforcement Forces of the Islamic Republic
Maliheh and family filed a complaint with the Law Enforcement Forces of the Islamic Republic

Ashkan has not slept a wink for six days, since the day Bobby was shot right before his eyes.

On May 7, Ashkan took Bobby, his seven-year-old dog, out for a walk in Kouhsar Park. Soon after, a policeman shot and killed Bobby at point blank range.

Ashkan, 27, adopted Bobby when the dog was a puppy. “I am not ready to talk,” he says on the telephone, his voice shaking as he utters the name.

Bobby grew up with Ashkan’s family. Maliheh, Ashkan's sister, tells me the whole story, from the day that Bobby was brought home to that day in Kouhsar Park. Sometimes she has a lump in her throat and cannot speak; other times she shouts in anger and grief. “We are in mourning,” she says. “It’s like losing your seven-year-old sister. Since the day it happened, Ashkan has been sitting listlessly in a corner and crying constantly. It’s exactly like somebody whose sister or daughter has been murdered before his eyes.”

They first time they saw Bobby was in Sadeghieh Square in western Tehran. A street vendor, who clearly had a drug problem, held the dog’s leash.  “It was cold,” says Maliheh. “The poor creature was very small and was shivering. Our hearts were touched; we bought him straight away.” Bobby was no more than a week old at the time.

Ashkan and Maliheh fed Bobby milk and made sure the dog was okay. “At first we thought it was a boy, so we named it Bobby,” says Maliheh. “But when it grew older we noticed that it was a she. We got her an ID tag. The name on the ID was ‘Barbie,’ but we continued to call her Bobby out of habit.”

Bobby was not the only dog in Maliheh and Askhan’s house. On the phone, I can hear barking in the background. “Right now we have three puppies,” Maliheh says. “We take care of abandoned dogs. We care for dogs that have been injured, have been in an accident or are ill, until they are doing better. Then we put them up for adoption. But we had paid for Bobby. We knew that Bobby had no pedigree. I mean, she was a kind of Iranian dog, but her pedigree was not important to us. The important thing was that this little puppy was shivering in the winter cold, with a street vendor holding her leash.”

Recently, Maliheh or Ashkan took Bobby out for a run every day. “Bobby had grown fat,” Maliheh explains. “The vet had said that her liver had fatty tissue so she had to go on a diet and run for an hour each day.”

When Maliheh gets to the day of the accident, she takes a deep breath. “Every day one of us took Bobby out,” she repeats after a pause of a few seconds. “Thursday evening, Ashkan took Bobby to the top of Kouhsar. They had gone out at 6pm and returned to the car at half past seven so Bobby could drink some water. Bobby drank some water and barked once, which made Ashkan notice the policeman. Ashkan was holding the leash, but it was long, so Bobby moved forward a little bit. Still, Bobby was a meter and a half away from the policeman. Ashkan called Bobby and she moved toward Ashkan. He noticed that the policeman was going for his gun. He shouted, “Don’t shoot. She won’t attack.”

But the policeman did not stop; he fired. Maliheh swallows hard and says in a broken voice, “The bullet entered through the back of her neck and came out through her mouth.”

Ashkan embraced Bobby, cried and started hitting the car with his head. “He was beside himself,” says Maliheh. “But the policeman checked Ashkan’s ID and told him, ‘Take this unclean creature away. Put it in the car and take it away’.”

Ashkan took Bobby home and called the family to come and say goodbye. “We were all devastated,” Maliheh remembers. “My mother was hitting herself. We all went to Kouhsar police station. I asked the policeman, ‘Why did you kill our dog? What did it do?’ Threatening me, he brought out his teargas canister and said, ‘So what if I did? I will kill 10 more. I’d even kill people!’ I told him, ‘we help dogs who have no shelter. We feed dogs.’ And he said, ‘the hell you do!’ He was in no way sorry for what he had done. He told us, ‘Your dog had no leash and you put the leash on after it was dead.’ Like we were crazy enough to put a leash on the bloodied body of a dead dog. He lied so easily.”

The family took their complaint to Police Center 197, which handles complaints against police agents.

“My brother is tall and well-built but he was really scared,” says Maliheh. “He said, ‘had I stayed he would have killed me.’”

They took Bobby’s body to Tehran’s Veterinary Clinic, where a veterinarian performed an autopsy. “It was Dr. Aledavoud, the head of SPCA, who did the autopsy on Bobby,” says Maliheh. “He said that Bobby had been shot from a meter away.”

Maliheh and the family have hired a lawyer to take on their case. They filed a complaint with the Law Enforcement Forces of the Islamic Republic (NAJA) against Officer Mehdi Shahbazi, the policeman who shot Bobby. Shahbazi has confessed to the killing, but claims that he was scared. “Don’t they have police dogs?” asks Maliheh. “Why should a policeman be afraid of dogs? Let alone the fact that Bobby was a domestic dog. She had grown up for seven years in our home. She would sleep on the bed and watch the children playing. Bobby was in no way a dangerous dog.”

Maliheh pauses and says, “I have no idea how Officer Shahbazi can repay what he has done to Bobby, and to us.” 

Related Articles: 

Man is a Beast to Man: Human and Animal Rights in Iran

 

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