Tehran, 25 April (AKI) - The spokesman of the Muslim Students Association at a Tehran polytechnic was arrested on Wednesday, Iranian news agency ILNA reports. Babak Zamanian was reportedly arrested because of interviews he gave to Farsi language radio stations that broadcast outside Iran. The students of the Amir Kabir Polytechnic made front page news around the world last December when they managed to prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on a visit to their campus, from making his speech. It was the first time since his landslide victory in June 2005 that Ahmadinejad had been challenged in public.
Dozens of protesters burned pictures of the Iranian president crying 'dictator go away', 'death to dictatorship' and threw firecrackers, forcing him to interrupt several times a speech and leave before scheduled. "The direction of the university had been warned we didn't want Ahmadinejad here," Mehdi Hatefi, an activist with students' group Tahkim Vahdat told Adnkronos International (AKI) at the time, saying the organisers had tried to fill up the lecture hall with people from other universities. |