On the Frontline of Iranian Student Protests in Support of Ganji

OhMyNews: The author of this article cannot be identified given the post-election crackdown on journalists, both domestic and international.


On Wednesday afternoon outside Tehran University, students gathered to protest the continued imprisonment of journalist Akbar Ganji, who is in his fourth week of a hunger strike. He has been in jail for 62 months. The secretary general of Advare Tahkime Vahdat the organization that led the protest, Mousavi Khoeeni, was also present. He was a legislator in the sixth parliament.



The sound of old protest songs sung by protestors filled the air that afternoon, as did the shouts from the police (in green and navy uniforms) who were using force to try to break up the demonstration. Note the man with the video camera, who is an intelligence agent filming all the protestor's faces. The man in the foreground is being dragged off to jail and an unknown fate.



For more than an hour, protestors and police clashed. Journalists were being hauled off to jail, and photographers' cameras were being smashed. It was necessary to use a long lens to capture these photos. Before the last election in June, the police didn't crack down like this. No one is sure what will happen in the coming days.



In this photo, a photographer for an Iranian news agency is being pushed into a police car, around 6 p.m. Many of those arrested are still unaccounted for.



Another man who was also caught up in the police roundup, a member of the Worker's Union, was also in hospital. He took off his shirt to show the world the injuries that the police had inflicted on him in the street with batons.