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YESTERDAY IN Tehran tens of thousands again returned to the streets in defiance of an interior ministry ban and the first deaths were reported. This was despite a call from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for acceptance of the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and for both sides to avoid “provocative words and deeds”. “There was truly a divine hand behind this election,” he says of the 85 per cent turnout figure that saw 10 million more vote than in any election since the revolution of 1979.

Clearly, however, the deeply polarised Iranian people remain to be convinced that “the hand of God” may not have been helped by some distinctly human agency. On the streets young people, infuriated by what they see as a stolen election, are being batoned and teargassed while all three defeated candidates insist that the constitutional watchdog, the clerical Guardian Council, rescind the election.