It was hot in the car, so the young woman and her singing instructor got out for a breath of fresh air on a quiet side street not far from the anti-government protests they had ventured out to attend. A gunshot rang out, and the woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, fell to the ground. “It burned me,” she said before she died.

The video of her death on Saturday, circulated in Iran and around the world, has made Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old, who, relatives said, was not political, an instant symbol of the anti-government movement.

Her death is stirring wide outrage in a society that is infused with the culture of martyrdom — although the word itself has become discredited because the government has pointed to the martyrs’ deaths of Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war to justify repressive measures.

Agha-Soltan’s fate resonates particularly with women, who have been at the vanguard of many of the protests throughout Iran. “I am so worried that all the sacrifices that we made in the past week, the blood that was spilled, would be wasted,” said one woman who came to mourn Agha-Soltan on Monday.

Opposition websites and TV channels have repeatedly shown the video, in which blood can be seen gushing from Agha-Soltan’s body as she dies. By Monday evening, there already were 6,860 entries for her on the Persian-language Google website. Some websites suggest changing the name of Kargar Street, where she was killed, to Neda Street.

Only scraps of information are known about Agha-Soltan. She studied philosophy and took underground singing lesson. Her name means voice in Persian, and many are now calling her the voice of Iran. Her fiancé, Caspian Makan, contributed to a Persian Wikipedia entry. He said she never supported any particular presidential candidate. “She wanted freedom, freedom for everybody,” the entry read.