Students in Iran have protested against their Islamist rulers for a fifth day, with dozens staging a sit-in at a central university as police surrounded other universities in Tehran to block more rallies at those sites.
The protest seemed to be a silent one, with many of those gathered wearing surgical white masks over their faces with black “X” marks to symbolize their voices being silenced.
Signs held up by the demonstrators indicated that their grievances were directed toward the Iranian government, which has faced daily protests since its Saturday admission that Iranian forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane mistaken for an enemy threat as it departed Tehran for Kyiv Jan. 8.
Several students at the Isfahan sit-in held a sign saying “1,500 + 176”, referencing the number of people the U.S. government has accused Iran of killing in a crackdown on nationwide protests last November, plus the number of people killed in the crash of the Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 jet.
The crash killed 82 Iranians and 57 Canadians, many of them students with dual Iranian citizenship who were flying to Kyiv en route to Canada to resume university studies after the winter break.
Iran has rejected allegations that it killed hundreds of people in the November crackdown as exaggerated without providing its own official death toll.
Another sign held by one of the protesters at the Isfahan sit-in read, “We are not seditionists.”
There was no word on whether Iranian security forces responded to the apparent silent protest.
It was a different scene in Tehran, where video clips obtained by VOA appeared to show unusually high police deployments at entrances to Amirkabir University and Tehran University on Wednesday.
Hundreds of students had staged noisy anti-government protests at several university campuses in the Iranian capital in the prior four days and had planned to do so again Wednesday, according to a widely shared social media posting seen by VOA.
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