Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Dec. 01 One of the students who took part in a demonstration earlier this week against the new appointed chancellor of the University of Tehran has received an order to appear before court or face arrest. Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Dec. 01 One of the students who took part in a demonstration earlier this week against the new appointed chancellor of the University of Tehran has received an order to appear before court or face arrest.
Irans hard-line government appointed Ayatollah Amid Zanjani, a cleric notorious for being a religious prosecutor in the 1980s, as the new university chancellor. His predecessor, an academic, expressed surprise at the unprecedented haste over the transition.
The ceremony, however, turned into a fiasco as students abandoned classes and held a demonstration during which they threw his turban off his head.
Davoud Dashtbani, an activist in the university, received an official order to appear before court within three days or face arrest.
Dashtbani has been charged with Insulting the Clergy, a punishable crime in Islamic Iran.
On Tuesday, a semi-official daily accused Irans opposition forces of being behind the demonstrations during the inauguration ceremony.
The hard-line daily Kayhan wrote that the protest had been planned in advance by a number of student activists, including a woman tied to the main Iranian opposition group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK). It identified the woman only by the initials F.H.
During the protest, students chanted, Appointed head, resign now! and Even if we students die, we will not accept humiliation.