Iranian authorities arrested more students in connection with last week's riots, press reports said yesterday as the regime sought to downplay political bickering and blame the violence on students in the pay of foreign governments.
Several members of an Islamic students council close to Iran's reformist President, Dr Moham mad Khatami, were arrested by police as they were about to hold a press conference that never took place on Saturday, the moderate Neshat newspaper said.
The paper gave no further details but the English-language Iran News reported that officials at Tehran University, where the press conference was due to take place, had also been informed of the arrests.
Local journalists invited to the campus for the press conference were turned away by university security, Iran News said.
News of the fresh detentions came a day after the Elected Council of Student Protesters said more than 1,400 people had been arrested following the worst unrest in Iran since the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The group, which includes representatives from the Tehran University dormitory where the violence first erupted 11 days ago, demanded the immediate release of all those detained, as well as a list of their names.
The Intelligence Ministry accused foreign nations of staging the disturbances. The ministry claimed that some of those arrested "took part in meetings with other counter-revolutionaries during trips to Turkey and the United States", adding others were "mercenaries" in the pay of foreign governments.
However, local papers have filled page after page with accusations from conservatives and reformers, each blaming the violence on the other as Iran prepares for parliamentary elections next spring.
"People close to the government provoked and encouraged these incidents," said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a leading member of the Iranian parliament, in an editorial in the conservative Abrar newspaper.
Mr Asadollah Badamchian from the anti-Khatami Islamic Coalition Association has claimed the riots were a sign that President Khatami and his administration were no longer fit to govern.
He singled out the Interior Minister, Mr Abdol-Vahed MussaviLari, a close Khatami ally, saying his ministry had utterly failed to contain the student unrest.
Reuters adds from Tehran:
President Khatami yesterday accepted the credentials of Britain's first ambassador to Tehran in 10 years, Mr Nicholas Browne, but warned that Tehran would allow no interference in its domestic affairs.
Mr Browne's Iranian counterpart, Mr Gholamreza Ansari, presented his credentials in London last week. The final return of ambassadors fulfils an agreement in New York last September to end differences over a fatwa or religious death edict against the British writer, Salman Rushdie, issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini.