Hundreds of thousands of Iranians attended a rally in support of the Islamic regime in Tehran yesterday as the country's leaders warned that anti-government protesters could face the death penalty as "counter-revolutionaries".
Later the Interior Minister, Mr Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari, said calm had been restored. "After setting up a crisis headquarters. . . and following the crisis minute by minute, and thanks to the national resolve which has developed, the crisis has been brought under control," he said.
Meanwhile, in a statement carried by the official news agency, IRNA, an organisation calling itself the "council of sitting-in students" urged students to halt their protests until Saturday to pave the way for negotiations with the government on their grievances.
The secretary of Iran's main security body, Mr Hassan Rouhani, promised a crowd of hundreds of thousands of hardline supporters of the regime that the authorities would conduct a "sweeping cleanup" after the worst unrest to hit Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The show of strength at Tehran University, called by the regime after six days of student unrest and growing violence, drew a turnout of more than a million, according to official estimates.
Pride of place on the official platform went to leading conservatives within the regime. The main absentee was Iran's reformist President Mohammad Khatami, until now the hero of the student protesters.
Those responsible for violent clashes with the security forces in the capital on Monday and Tuesday were "bandits and saboteurs", Mr Rouhani, the deputy speaker of parliament and secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, told the crowd.
He warned that those picked up over the past two days would be tried as "counter-revolutionaries" and as "corrupt of the Earth", categories normally liable for execution.
At least three Iranian opposition leaders were arrested at their homes by secret police in Iran yesterday, a representative of the Brussels-based opposition National Party said. He identified them as People's Party members, Mr Bahran Namazi, Mr Mehran Mir Abdol Baghi and Mr Rosrow Seyf.