TEHRAN: Five students in Iran have been detained after one of several anti-government protests held earlier this week, opposition websites said on Thursday. The Kaleme site reported that around 1,000 students rallied at Tehran’s Polytechnic University on Tuesday, an annual “students day” which was marked by several other small demonstrations at various campuses around Iran.
Authorities have cracked down on the opposition, which the government says are “seditionists” backed by foreign enemies, since huge rallies held for a few months after the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009.
The editor of pro-reform newspaper Sharq and four of his colleagues were arrested in the paper’s newsroom on Tuesday on the day it published a special report on the situation of students.
On another occasion which could provide a rallying point for opposition supporters, a website called for people to gather on Thursday at the grave of the late dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri to mark the first anniversary of his death according to the Islamic calendar.
An architect of the Islamic Revolution, Montazeri was named in the 1980s to succeed revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Iran’s top authority, but fell out with him over the mass execution of prisoners.
Protesters clashed with police at memorial ceremonies held after his death, aged 87, in December 2009.
Saham News, the website of Mehdi Karoubi, one of the candidates beaten by Ahmadinejad in an election the opposition says was rigged, carried a call for people to gather in an article which described Montazeri as “the moral father of the green movement”, a reference to the chosen colour of the reformist opposition.
