Saturday’s protests came as President Ebrahim Raisi said Iran’s cities were “safe and healthy” after earlier rejecting US President Joe Biden’s pledge to “liberate Iran”. The Islamic Republic has been gripped by protests that erupted after Amini died in custody after she was arrested for allegedly violating the country’s dress code for women. As the working week began, security forces took new measures to quell protests at Tehran’s universities, searching students and forcing them to remove masks, activists said. But protesters were heard chanting “I’m a free woman, you’re the pervert” at the Islamic Azad University in Mashhad, northeastern Iran, in a video released by BBC Persian. “A student dies but does not accept the humiliation,” chanted students at Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht, in videos posted online by an activist. In the northwestern city of Qazvin, dozens chanted similar slogans at a mourning ceremony 40 days after the death of protester Javad Haidari – a custom that sparked further protests. Norway-based rights group Hengaw said people were watching a “broad strike” in Amini’s hometown of Saqez in Kurdistan province, where shops were closed. A video later broadcast by Manoto, a foreign-based television channel banned in Iran, appeared to show students locked inside the Islamic Azad University in northern Tehran. A video reportedly shows Iranian protesters clashing with security forces in Iran’s northern city of Rast. Photo: UGC/AFP/Getty Images The ongoing unrest came as Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guards fired a new satellite missile on Saturday, state television reported. Iran’s state TV reported that the Guard had successfully launched the solid-fuel rocket it called the Ghaem-100 satellite carrier and broadcast dramatic footage of the missile launching from a desert launch pad against a cloudy sky. The report did not reveal the location, which appeared to be Iran’s northeastern Shahroud Desert. The state-run IRNA news agency reported that the carrier will be able to bring an 80-kilogram satellite into orbit about 500 kilometers from Earth. The US State Department called the launch “unhelpful and destabilizing”. Washington fears that the same long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into orbit could also be used to launch nuclear warheads. Tehran regularly denies that it has any such intention. The Oslo-based Iran Human Rights group said on Saturday that at least 186 people had been killed in the crackdown on the protests, an increase of 10 since Wednesday. It said another 118 people had died in separate protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchistan, a predominantly Sunni Muslim province in the southeast, bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. An official in Kerman province admitted that authorities had trouble quelling protests that erupted after Amini’s death on September 16. President Ebrahim Raisi speaks outside the former US embassy in Tehran at a rally Friday to mark the 43rd anniversary of the start of the Iran hostage crisis. Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images “Internet restrictions, the arrest of riot leaders and the state’s presence on the streets always put an end to insurgency, but this type of insurgency and its audience are different,” said Rahman Jalali, the province’s deputy for politics and security. , ISNA news agency reported. Iran sought to blame its arch-enemy the US for the protests, with Raishi on Saturday saying Washington had failed in its bid to repeat the 2011 Arab uprisings in the Islamic Republic, Iranian media reported. Raishi earlier dismissed Biden’s pledge to “liberate Iran,” responding that Iran had already been liberated since the Western-backed overthrow of the shah in 1979. “Our young men and women are determined and we will never allow you to carry out your satanic desires,” he told a rally commemorating the November 1979 seizure of the American embassy in Tehran by radical students. Biden had said on Friday while campaigning in the US mid-term elections: “Don’t worry, we will liberate Iran. They will be released soon.” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby played down Biden’s comments, saying: “The president was expressing our solidarity with the protesters as he has, frankly, since the beginning.” On Friday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform Binance acknowledged that funds belonging to or destined for Iranians had flowed through its service and may have violated US sanctions.
