Iranian students clashed with plainclothes security officers around Tehran University today during a protest to mark the anniversary of violent student unrest which shook the Islamic Republic three years ago.
Sporadic clashes between some of the 4,000 youths and officers broke out in streets and squares around the university, where hardline vigilantes launched a bloody attack on a student dormitory in 1999, sparking six "days of rage".
Some plainclothes men beat protesters and at least one journalist was injured, witnesses said. Some of the students were carried away by the agents in unmarked cars, they added.
The ISNA student news agency said security forces fired tear gas to try to disperse the crowds, but this could not be confirmed by witnesses.
The gates of Tehran University were guarded by police, plainclothes agents and vigilante volunteers while Revolutionary Guards mounted on pick-ups and armed with batons and machine-guns patrolled the streets nearby, witnesses said.
"Unity, unity, political prisoners should be freed," the youths chanted.
It was the biggest show of student wrath at the slow pace of change in Iran since the demonstrations three years ago and similar unrest in the western city of Khoramabad in August 2000.
Iran's students, once the powerhouse behind the 1979 Islamic revolution, became galvanised behind growing calls for reform in the mid-1990s. But since 1999 the movement has been rent by prosecutions, imprisonment and bitter factional feuds.
Earlier, student leaders said they had called off a planned meeting following an Interior Ministry order banning the protest for fear "opportunist elements" would take advantage of the situation to stoke tension.
During the demonstration, some youths urged police to join them in an echo of calls which helped neutralise the shah's security forces in 1979.
"Police, police, join us," they chanted.
Some officers responded and prevented plainclothes agents seizing a young woman dressed in a loose-fitting headscarf popular with those disgruntled with Iran's strict Islamic dress code, witnesses said.
Witnesses said many of the students, hugely outnumbered by security forces, had dispersed by mid-evening.