The Albany Gazette - Iran protests swell, as Guards chief says stay home

Security forces had targeted a hospital and a student dormitory overnight, a rights group said, as the protest movement that flared over Amini's death entered a seventh week.

Amini, 22, died in custody on September 16 after her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of Iran's strict dress rules for women based on Islamic sharia law.

Security forces have struggled to contain the women-led protests that have evolved into a broader campaign to end the Islamic republic founded in 1979.

Students protested on Saturday, the start of the working week in Iran, at campuses in Tehran, Kerman in southern Iran and the western city of Kermanshah, among others, online videos showed.

"Shameless, shameless," students shouted as they clashed with security personnel at a university in Ahvaz, southwest Iran, in footage published by the 1500tasvir social media channel.

They turned out even as Major General Hossein Salami, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told demonstrators: "Do not come to the streets! Today is the last day of the riots."

Salami was addressing mourners who gathered in Shiraz to bury worshippers killed Wednesday in a mass shooting at a shrine in the southern city.

The massacre at the Shah Cheragh mausoleum came on the same day that thousands paid tribute to Amini across Iran, 40 days after her death in police custody.

- Gunfire outside hospital -

Ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi appeared Thursday to link the shrine attack, one of the country's deadliest in years, to what his government calls "riots" sparked by Amini's death.

Commemorations were also held Saturday for protesters killed in a what Amnesty International has called the "unrelenting brutal crackdown".

"Death to the dictator," mourners chanted at a ceremony to mark 40 days since the slaying of a protester in the western city of Divandarreh, using a slogan aimed at supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Rights groups say riot police shot Mohsen Mohammadi, 28, during protests in Divandarreh on September 19, and he died the next day at Kausar hospital in the flashpoint western city of Sanandaj.

Dozens of people who had gathered outside the same hospital late Friday to protect another wounded protester came under fire from the security forces, the Hengaw rights group said.

"People who had gathered in front of the Kausar Sanandaj hospital to defend Ashkan Mrwati were shot at by repressive forces," said the Norway-based organisation.

"These forces want to capture Ashkan Mrwati while he is injured," it said, before tweeting an image it said was of him lying on a gurney and responding to a medic.

Soon after, Hengaw said, the same security forces also "fired at the nearby student dorm" of the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences.

In online footage verified by AFP, security forces are seen arriving on more than a dozen motorbikes before shooting up into the dormitory building.

In other verified footage, security forces are seen firing tear gas late Friday into a residential block in the Tehran neighbourhood of Chitgar where a massive protest was held the night before.

- 'CIA plot' -

Female students chanting on a street in Kermanshah on Saturday came under fire from the security forces, wounding some of them, including two critically, Hengaw said.

The demonstrations have continued despite a crackdown that the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group said Friday had killed at least 160 protesters, including more than two dozen children.

At least another 93 people were killed during separate protests that erupted on September 30 in the southeastern city of Zahedan over the reported rape of a teenage girl by a police commander, IHR says.

Worshippers in Zahedan came under automatic gunfire again Friday as they emerged from weekly prayers, said the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency.

At least 20 security personnel have been killed in the Amini protests, and at least another eight in Zahedan, according to an AFP tally based on official reports.

Despite the bloodshed, the protests triggered by Amini's death show no signs of dwindling, inflamed by public outrage over the crackdown.

Iran has sought to portray the movement as a plot hatched by its arch-enemy the United States.

In a joint statement on Friday, Iran's intelligence ministry and the Guards' intelligence services said the CIA had been conspiring with spy agencies in Israel, Britain and Saudi Arabia "to spark riots" in Iran and set up networks of "accomplices" among other acts.

burs-dv/jsa

(L.Kaufmann--BBZ)