Report: Shots fired at pro-Mousavi rally in Tehran

Haaretz:

Report: Shots fired at pro-Mousavi rally in Tehran
By Reuters

Iranian state television said shots were fired during a mass rally in support of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in Tehran on Monday and that people were running away.

"There has been sporadic shooting out there ... I can see people running here," a reporter of Iran's English-language Press TV said in a live call from Tehran's Azadi Square.

"A number of people who are armed, I don't know exactly who they are, but they have started to fire on people causing havoc in Azadi Square," he said.

In defiance of a government ban, tens of thousands of supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi marched in downtown Tehran on Monday to protest what they said was Iran's rigged election.

Several kilometers of a central thoroughfare were packed with crowds who came to hear Mousavi and other pro-reform leaders who back his call for Friday's vote, won by hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to be annulled.

State television showed pictures of Mousavi addressing part of the crowd through a megaphone. He told them he was ready in case new elections were called in the Islamic Republic, an aide told Reuters.

"Tanks and guns have no use any longer," chanted the crowd in a deliberate echo of slogans used in protests leading up to Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.

Calling on Ahmadinejad to resign, they said the election results resembled a "coup d'etat" and chanted "Death to the lying government".

"I just want to show the president that we are not bandits. I want my vote back," said Maryam Sedaghati, a young woman wearing a green headscarf -Mousavi's campaign colour.

Official results gave Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote and Mousavi 34 percent, figures which the moderate former prime minister has dismissed as a "dangerous charade".

He has appealed to Iran's top legislative body for the vote to be cancelled.

Wearing green and carrying photographs of Mousavi, the crowd chanted: "Where are the 63 percent who voted for Ahmadinejad?"

As a police helicopter flew overhead, the crowd booed.

They vowed to continue daily protests to keep pressure on authorities. "We fight, we die, we will not accept this vote rigging," they chanted, and also: "By the end of the week, Ahmadinejad will be gone".

The three days of protests and clashes since Iran's election results were declared on Saturday have been the most serious since Iran's Islamic revolution three decades ago.

They follow boisterous election campaigning by Mousavi supporters, who flooded the streets of affluent northern Tehran for nightly rallies ahead of the vote.