Monday, June 15, 2009

Iran erupts

Iranian police try to disperse demonstrators


Many Mousavi supporters don green


Mousavi [grey shirt with hands raised] encourages hundreds of thousands of fellow Iranians

Attack on Mousavi supporters leaves one dead

Hundreds of thousands of opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defied an Interior Ministry ban and streamed into central Tehran to cheer their pro-reform leader [pictured above with grey shirt in crowd] in his first public appearance since elections that he alleges were marred by fraud. Gunfire from a compound used by pro-government militia killed one demonstrator.

The outpouring - swelling as more poured from buildings and side streets - followed a decision by Iran's most powerful figure for an investigation into the vote-rigging allegations.

[A]n Associated Press photographer saw one person shot and killed and several others who appeared to be seriously wounded in the square. The gunfire came from volunteer militia linked to Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard.

The chanting crowd - many wearing the trademark green color of Mousavi's campaign - was more than five miles long, was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. The prospect of spiraling protests and clashes is the ultimate nightmare for the Islamic establishment, [who] risks having dissidents directly target the ruling theocracy.

Overnight, police and militia stormed the campus at the city's biggest university, ransacking dormitories and arresting dozens of students. Tehran University was the site of serious clashes against student-led protests in 1999 and is one of the nerve centers of the pro-reform movement.
[Jerusalem Post]
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