At least 10 dead in Iranian violence

At least 10 people were killed in Saturday’s violence in Tehran, state television reported on Sunday, after the opposition defied the supreme leader’s warnings against protests and took to the streets to demand a re-run of the June 12 election.

After a day of intense tension and clashes between protesters and police and pro-government militias which had deployed in huge numbers on the streets of Tehran, state television said that another 100 people were also injured.

While demonstrators blamed the violence on government forces, state television insisted that none of its troops had killed people, saying the violence was perpetrated by ”armed terrorist elements”.

Adding to the tension, footage on the Facebook networking website showed a young woman supporter of Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the opposition leader, having been shot in the chest on Saturday in the protests. The graphic footage, which was widely viewed, showed the woman dying in front of her father who desperately tried to save her.

A caption accompanying the images claimed that a member of the ideologically motivated basij militia, part of the elite Revolutionary Guard, had fired at the woman from the rooftop of a nearby residential building.

Despite the unrest, Mr Moussavi on Sunday refused to bow to the ultimatum by the country’s supreme leader against street protests, calling on supporters to pursue peaceful demonstrations against the presidential election results and laying the blame for violence on the authorities.

A relative of Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, confirmed that, Faezeh, the younger daughter of the former president, was arrested on Saturday after she joined protesters. ”She is not released yet and is under interrogation now,” the relative said on Sunday.

A grand-daughter of Mr Rafsanjani’s was released on Sunday along with two other female relatives who had been jailed together.

Domestic news agencies also reported that Iran’s culture ministry had given Jon Leyne, the BBC correspondent in Tehran, 24 hours to leave the country for filing ”false reports” and ”indirectly provoking rioters”.

In a sign of growing concern over the crisis from the top clerics in the holy city of Qom, the Guardian Council on Saturday met three grand ayatollahs. The clerics called on the Council to ”observe the law” and follow through the complaints of candidates over the election result.

Mr Moussavi says the election was stolen to the benefit of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, declared on Friday that the Islamic Republic had no ”mechanism” for massive fraud, and insisted that the re-election of the president was the fair outcome of the vote.

Mr Moussavi’s defiant statement on Sunday followed a day of intense tension in Tehran, with much of the downtown in chaos, as opposition supporters defied warnings from Ayatollah Khamenei and took to the streets, confronting an army of police and pro-government militia.

But while the supreme leader had warned that leaders of the opposition would be held responsible for violence, Mr Moussavi responded by saying: “The responsibility is with those who are not tolerating peaceful behaviour.”

Mr Moussavi again insisted that election fraud was “massive,” after the supreme leader had said that the Islamic Republic had no mechanism for altering the results of elections. Mr Moussavi also suggested that the behaviour of the regime was undermining the whole Islamic Republic, and called on the country’s youth “not to let liars and cheaters steal the flag of defending the Islamic system”.

Ali Larijani, the speaker of parliament, said in a statement that western powers should stop “interfering” in Iran’s internal affairs or face “Iran’s response in other areas,” a veiled warning that Tehran could ratchet up its attempts to undermine western interests in the Middle East.

The warning came after Barack Obama, the US president, issued his strongest criticism yet of Iran’s government crackdown.