Last night the BBC Persian service broadcast for the first time a very disturbing video of the attack by the Basij militia and riot police on Tehran University’s campus just two days after the stolen election last June. The attack was one of the seminal events of Iran’s post-election unrest in which the police broke locks and then bones as they rampaged through the dormitories, carted off more than 100 students and killed five.
The following day I went to Tehran University to report on the student protest. Students were demonstrating inside the university and behind the iron bars that separated them from outside. They carried a banner with the names of those who were arrested the night before. I talked to some students and took a picture of their banner. They also gave me the names of those five classmates who were killed in the campus attack.
A month later, I wrote a detailed story for the Guardian of what happened during the attack on the university campus, pieced together from interviews with students. But the new video shown on the BBC reveals more details from that shocking night.
For months, the Iranian authorities denied any incursion on to the campus took place but later supreme leader Seyed Ali Khamenei claimed that the unknown people – not the Basij or riot police – had attacked the students on the campus.
Surprisingly, the video shown on the BBC is not amateur footage but leaked from the police archive (how it came into the BBC’… >>>
