Protests in Iran Spread, and an Imam Urges Severe Punishment
By NAZILA FATHI
The NYTimes
TEHRAN, June 20 — Protests here spread to at least eight other cities around the country today as a high-ranking imam called for the severe punishment of protesters.
Scores of student arrests continued. The total is not known. In Tabriz, student Web sites report the number so far may be as high as 135.
The Amir Kabir University Web site in Tehran reported that 50 students had been arrested in Yazd and 105 in Sabzehvar.
Children of prominent reformist politicians, including two members of Parliament, Ahmad Shirzad and Mohsen Safai Farahani, were among those arrested in Tehran.
Mr. Shirzad, in a letter to Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, the head of the judiciary, said he had witnessed arrests being made based on an illegal court order allowing the police to take in anyone they found suspicious, the Iranian Student News Agency reported.
Emrooz, a Web site close to reformers, reported that the judiciary had also arrested four of the vigilantes who had attacked protesters last week with knives and truncheons.
The nightly protests in Tehran have now moved from the area around Tehran University to other parts of the city. Large numbers of people drove to the Ressalat neighborhood tonight, causing traffic jams, despite roadblocks operated by paramilitary forces carrying Kalashnikov rifles. Witnesses said vigilantes and the police, in riot gear, had clashed with protesters.
The executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, Hanny Megally, said in a statement that Iran's leaders had not taken any real steps to halt attacks by vigilantes on protesters.
Earlier, at Friday Prayers in Tehran, Ayatollah Muhammad Yazdi, former head of the judiciary, said the protesters should be punished severely. "I asked the head of the judiciary and public prosecutors across Iran not to treat these people with compassion as they endangered the country's security," he said.
He added that the judiciary should deal with those people as those who fight Allah. The charge of fighting Allah can carry the death sentence.
Demonstrations took place in Tabriz, Zanjan, Shiraz, Yazd, Sabzehvar, Kermanshah and Isfahan. A student Web site reported that students at the University of Sistan-Baluchestan, in southeastern Iran, were demanding that the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, cede power to an elected body.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/21/international/middleeast/21IRAN.html