TEHRAN Iran
Fifteen Iranian reformist students and one mother were beaten up by police and plainclothes security agents and detained Monday on the anniversary of a bloody raid on a Tehran university dormitory, student leaders said.
“Six students were attacked, beaten up and then detained by police and plainclothes security agents as they staged a sit-in at the main entrance to Amir Kabir University,” Nariman Mostafavi, a reformist student leader told The Associated Press.
Nine other students and the mother of one of them were also attacked and detained later Monday after police and plainclothes security agents broke windows and forced their way into the offices of the student group in central Tehran, said Mostafavi, a leader of the Office for Fostering Unity, Iran’s largest reformist student group.
There was no immediate confirmation of the arrests from authorities, but the government rarely comments on such arrests.
Iran on Monday had banned street protests to mark the anniversary of July 9, 1999 raid by police and hard-line vigilantes on the Tehran university dormitory that killed one person and injured at least 20 others.
Those attacks triggered six days of nationwide protests, the worst since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and brought hard-line clerics to power.
