More than 100 arrested at Tehran opposition rally

TEHRAN - More than 100 people have been arrested on charges of “disturbing the public order” during a demonstration earlier this week in Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported Saturday.

Ignoring warnings from security officials, thousands of opposition supporters gathered on the streets of Tehran to protest the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Wednesday. The protest took place at the same time as annual state-organised, anti-US rallies were underway.

“Police forces arrested 109 people who disturbed the public order and security on the sideline of Wednesday’s rally,” Tehran’s police chief Azizollah Rajabzadeh was quoted as saying by IRNA.

“Forty-seven were released later, but the rest are still in jail and their files were sent to the judiciary for further actions,” Rajabzadeh said.

Opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who say the June 12 presidential election was rigged to secure Ahmadinejad’s victory, had urged their supporters to continue their protest and to take to the streets.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and their allied Basij militia had warned the opposition not to try to hijack the annual rally to revive protests against the clerical establishment that began after the disputed vote.

Several journalists and foreign nationals were also arrested by security forces. Two Germans and a Canadian were freed later Friday.

An Agence France Presse (AFP) reporter, Farhad Pouladi, and a Danish student, Niels Krogsgard, who was in the country to write an essay on Iranian politics, are still in detention in connection with the rally.

Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi said decision on the status of the two journalists would be taken as soon as the judiciary receives necessary documents requested from relevant authorities.

Only a few days after the disputed June vote, which plunged Iran into its deepest internal crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution, foreign media were banned from directly covering the street protests.