Police fire warning shots & tear gas as clashes break out
TEHRAN (Agencies)
Iranian police fired tear gas and warning shots in the air on Monday at protesters gathered in central Tehran chanting slogans against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, witnesses said, as the nation marked Students Day.
Witnesses reported clashes between protesters, mainly university students, and policemen at several universities and prominent districts of Tehran, which was flooded with security force members who arrested several demonstrators.
"Police fired tear gas at groups of protesters chanting slogans against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Vali Asr intersection and Enghelab Street," a witness told AFP, referring to prominent locations in central Tehran.
" We are asking all people to come to universities so we can have one voice to protest at the coup d’état "
Student statement
The protesters were chanting "Death to the Dictator" and "Do not be scared. We are all together," the witness said, adding that some protesters also beat up a policeman.
The incidents could not be independently verified as foreign media have been banned from covering Monday's event.
Students of Tehran's prestigious Amir Kabir University had earlier urged protests against Ahmadinejad, in an online statement.
"We are asking all people to come to universities so we can have one voice to protest at the coup d’état," said the statement, issued by the group going under the name "Green university students of Iranian universities."
Green was the signature color of main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi's election campaign for the June 12 presidential poll. He lost to Ahmadinejad in what he claims was a "fraudulent" election staged to return the hardliner to power.
Since then his supporters have taken to streets in Tehran at the slightest opportunity to demonstrate against Ahmadinejad, accusing him of "stealing their votes."
Hundreds of thousands of protesters poured onto streets in the immediate aftermath of the poll and in the deadly unrest that followed dozens were killed and thousands arrested.
The defiant protests shook the pillars of the Iranian regime in what was one of its worst crises since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
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Warnings of crack down
" If you silence all the universities, what can you do with the situation of the society? "
Mir Hossein Mousavi
The elite Revolutionary Guards have warned they will crack down on any attempt by regime opponents to hijack the annual Students Day, which marks the 1953 killing by the shah's security forces of three students, just months after a US-backed coup toppled popular prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq.
Anticipating mass protests, hundreds of police have been deployed around Tehran University, one of the city's most politically sensitive institutions, to prevent the protests, witnesses told AFP.
According a reformist website authorities have shut down the mobile phone network in central Tehran to block supporters of Mousavi communicating with each other.
Neither Mousavi nor Karroubi have issued direct calls for protests on Monday, but the former has challenged the authorities as they moved to prevent them.
"If you silence all the universities, what can you do with the situation of the society?" Mousavi asked in a statement posted on his website Kaleme.com.
He warned Iranian authorities they are "fighting with shadows in the streets," referring to protesters.
The conservative bloc of Iran's parliament, meanwhile, urged opposition figures to give up their "political obstinacy."
"... we have ample proof the reformists wanted to substitute the Islamic regime with a secular democracy" after the election, the official IRNA news agency quoted the statement as saying.
"... we recommend to the gentlemen to give up their behavior which smells of political obstinacy."
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