Protests / Unrest
September 7
1. At around 4:30 PM Tehran time, security forces entered the office of Mousavi’s campaign committee, who are pursuing the fate of detainees, without any warrants or court orders. They confiscated all documents and material inside the office and took it with them to an undisclosed location. When asked about [...]

Ayatollah Hashim Hashim-Zadeh Hareesi – a member of the Assembly of Experts – said today that people had started to distrust the system. He explained that whatever had happened after the election had caused people to become suspicious and that the government needed to take strides to restore people’s trust otherwise, distrust could result in further more severe problems.

Hamid Maddah, a core member of Mousavi’s campaign in Mashhad, died in custody on Saturday. He had been arrested in Gowharshad Mosque along with many other Mousavi supporters. According to sources, he had been tortured badly and wasn’t able to recover. The official death certificate registers the cause of death as internal bleeding in the skull.

I’m NiteOwl AKA Josh Shahryar – twitter.com/iran_translator on twitter – and I’ve been immersed in tweets from Iran for the past several hours. I have tried to be extremely careful in choosing my tweet sources. What I have compiled below is what I can confirm through my reliable twitter sources. Remember, this is all from [...]

Khatami criticized the government in a new, harsher tone that suggested outright contempt today. He called the elections a “coup d’état against democracy.” He asked, “How can the Iranian people calm down when their votes were stolen? When their blood is and has been shed? When they are being hauled away and arrested en masse? When the government and media blatantly ignore them?” He asked, “How is a National reconciliation even remotely possible in a country that is turning into a police state?” He went on to say that what’s happening now in Iran “is a direct violation of the very rights people are promised in the constitution.” He accused the media of attempting to provoke further unrest and violence and denounced the governments’ attempts at censorship. He predicted that Regime’s establishment would fail if this were to continue.

Maziar Bahari was forced to confess at a press conference that the protests were pre-planned and organized from abroad. Bahari is an adroit Iranian-Canadian Journalist and filmmaker, who has written for Newsweek and the New Statesman. Meanwhile,the torture of university students continues in the Ministry of Interior. Some Iranians traveling to Iran for the holidays have been taken in for questioning directly at the airport as they tried to leave the country. They were questioned because of updated information on their Facebook accounts.

Human rights groups claim that so far over 2,000 people are still in detention. Reports have surfaced that there is no more space left for women in Tehran’s official prisons. Human rights’ activists report on unsanitary and inappropriate conditions for imprisoned women protesters in Iran’s overcrowded jails. At least 60 of imprisoned women are in the public wards and have only been given a blanket and are forced to sleep in corridors.

Thousands of people gathered in Tehran’s Ghoba Mosque today at a rally planned to coincide with the 7 Tir bombing that killed Ayatollah Beheshti and 70 other prominent clerics in 1981. The mosque was filled and the streets and alleys leading up to the mosque were completely crowded by protesters chanting “Where’s our vote?” Reports indicate that the number was somewhere between 3 and 10 thousand. Beheshti’s son addressed the crowd and said that the current regime was pushing people backwards and was not in touch with current realities of the world. He said that the Sea of Green could stand this and were protesting.