Iranian authorities have carried out a tough crackdown on spiralling anti-regime protests, setting brutal vigilante groups loose against demonstrators and rounding up opposition dissidents blamed as being behind four consecutive nights of protests.
In the early hours of Saturday, hundreds of Basij volunteer militia, many wielding sticks and iron bars, were seen chasing and beating groups of demonstrators in the streets outside the Tehran University campus, which have been the focal point of the increasingly vitriolic protests.
The student news agency ISNA said that at least 15 students were badly wounded - one critically - when vigilantes armed with knives and chains attacked them inside the university's dormitory complex.
Gunshots were also heard in the area as armed members of the militia, fierce defenders of the nearly 25-year-old Islamic regime, sped around side streets on motorbikes seeking to silence slogans aimed at Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. One person also received a gunshot wound to the leg.
ISNA, quoting an unnamed MP from the southern city of Shiraz, said that one protestor involved in clashes there late on Friday was ‘probably dead’ after being beaten about the head with an iron bar by members of the pro-regime Ansar Hezbollah vigilante group. But the agency also quoted a provincial official as denying any fatality there.
Ayatollah Khamenei has accused the United States of orchestrating the unrest. Many protestors seeking to join the fray were answering calls from US-based opposition satellite television channels.
State television and radio also accused foreign media of distorting their coverage of the unrest.
The protests have drawn support from the United States, where President George W Bush included Iran into an ‘axis of evil’ along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
On Thursday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said ‘Iranians like all people have a right to determine their own destiny. The United States fully supports their aspirations to live in freedom’.
