(AKI) - A group of supporters of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday forced their way into the campus of top Tehran university Amir Kabir Polytechnic and assaulted a group of student activists who were staging a peaceful rally against the detention of their spokesman Babak Zamanian, who was arrested last week. About a dozen students who were stabbed and attacked with chains were transferred to hospital. A similar attack by Ahmadinejad supporters was carried out Monday against activists at the university of Lorestan, in western Iran.
About a dozen government supporters wounded with knives students who were staging a demonstration on campus. One of the protesters, Siamak Nadali is in hospital in a critical condition.
Students at the university of Lorestan were carrying out an all-out protest, following the example of their peers in the capital Tehran, in Babol near the Caspian sea, and Shiraz in the west, who are rallying against new government measures imposing strict new dress codes and opening hours on campus as well as restrictions on political activity.
Last December, dozens of protesters burned pictures of Ahmadinejad crying 'dictator go away', 'death to dictatorship' and threw firecrackers when Ahmadinejad was visiting Amir Kabir university in Tehran. The rally forced him to interrupt several times a speech he was giving and leave before scheduled.
The studentsÂ’ complaints largely mirrored public frustrations over the presidentÂ’s crackdown on civil liberties, his poor economic policies and a Holocaust denial conference his government had organised early December. They also protested against the presidentÂ’s campaign to purge the universities of all aspects of the reform movement of his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. It was the first time since his landslide victory in June 2005 that Ahmadinejad was challenged in public. |