Despite widening crackdown: Students protest, shopkeepers go on strike in Iran

PARIS: Iranian students protested and shopkeepers went on strike on Saturday despite a widening crackdown, according to reports on social media, as demonstrations that flared over Mahsa Amini´s death entered an eighth week.

The clerical state has been gripped by protests that erupted when Amini, 22, died in custody after her arrest for an alleged breach of Iran´s strict dress code for women.

As the working week got underway, security forces adopted new measures to halt protests at universities in Tehran, searching students and forcing them to remove facemasks, activists said.

But demonstrators were heard chanting “I am a free woman, you are the pervert” at Islamic Azad University of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, in a video published by BBC Persian. “A student dies, but doesn´t accept humiliation,” sang students at Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht, in footage posted online by an activist. AFP was unable to immediately verify the videos.

In the northwestern city of Qazvin, dozens chanted similar slogans at a mourning ceremony 40 days after the death of demonstrator Javad Heydari -- a custom that has fuelled further protest flashpoints.

The Norway-based Hengaw rights group said people were observing a “widespread strike” in Amini´s home town of Saqez, in Kurdistan province, where shops were shuttered.

A video aired later by Manoto, a television channel based abroad and banned in Iran, appeared to show students locked inside Islamic Azad University in north Tehran.

Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights said on Saturday that at least 186 people have been killed in the protest crackdown, a rise of 10 from Wednesday.

It said another 118 people had lost their lives in separate protests since September 30 in Sistan-Baluchistan, a mainly Sunni Muslim province in the southeast, on the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.