'We were around 500 people in Amirabad Street when police came from all sides and unleashed terror,' Khoshnya said.

'They first baton-charged and tear-gassed people and then opened fire at the unarmed protesters. Thirty people died there and many more were injured.'

Khoshnya still remembers how Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman who later become a symbol of the opposition cause in Iran, was hit by a bullet and slumped to the ground. He immediately snapped a picture of her with face and head smeared in blood, a picture which is posted on his blog http://bekhatereh-iran.persianblog.ir/, which he co-edits with his friend Pisar Ironi, an Iranian refugee living in Denmark.

'Those animals also beat me up with batons and broke my leg when I tried to save my one female relative. But thank God I did not lose my cell-phone where I had the pictures,' said Khoshnya as he pulled up his shirt to show the scars on his back, still fresh after 40 days.

With the bloggers and twitters partly circumventing the restrictions imposed on international media, Iranian authorities have intensified their campaign to trace the oppositional voices back to their computers.

Some of the 34 media workers detained after the election are bloggers, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. Many others have gone underground, waiting for an opportunity to flee to a neighbouring country.

Feeling relatively safe with a trusted family in Islamabad, the young reformist still posts reports and pictures shared by his dozens of friends from Iran, with the conviction that change is imminent.

'I have great hope in our resistance,' said Khoshnya. 'The Iranian people have tolerated with complete silence the repression, brutality, exploitation in the name of religion for 30 years. But now they say 'enough is enough'.'

'They have woken up now and you will see, in a maximum of two years, that the present regime will experience the same fate as that of (late Iraqi president) Saddam Hussein.'