Plainclothes police and security forces, many of them armed, have tried to flood Iran’s remaining open universities in an attempt to crush a fourth day of student protests against the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
Running battles were reported on some campuses, with videos showing fistfights between the Basji state-backed militia and students at the University of Science and Technology in Tehran, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reported.
Pick-up trucks with machine-guns were photographed parked outside the University of Tehran, with demonstrations also in Mashhad.
Elsewhere, students found themselves barred from entry if they had been identified as being involved in previous protests and university administrators also announced the closure of in-person classes. Nearly 80 per cent of Iran’s universities are already conducting virtual courses, partly to prevent students being given a chance to gather to demonstrate against the government and its brutal crackdown of the January protests.
In videos from the University of Art in Tehran, a range of chants could be heard, including ‘We fight, we die, we take back Iran’ and ‘Political prisoners must be freed’.
The protests form an uneasy backdrop to the third round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme due to be held in Geneva tomorrow between the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, and the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff.
Iran’s attorney general, Mohammad Mohebi Azad, yesterday demanded retribution against the protesters. “The responsible agencies must quickly identify the related elements and take decisive and legal action against them,” he said. “Whenever the system has been on the path of negotiations, certain currents, under the guidance of the enemy, have tried to inflame the domestic atmosphere.”
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