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Protesters have gathered outside a prison near the Iranian capital in an attempt to prevent the rumoured imminent execution of two young detainees found guilty of running over a police officer in a car during protests in November.

Footage posted on social media showed the mother of one of the men, 22-year-old Mohammad Ghobadlou, pleading for her son outside Rajaei-Shahr prison in Karaj, a satellite city west of Tehran. She said it had been established that her son had not been at the scene when the police officer died.

Human rights activists had raised the alarm after Ghobadlou and fellow prisoner Mohammad Boroughani were taken to solitary confinement, which is often a preliminary step before execution. Their lawyers are claiming the two men require a retrial in the supreme court.

Four people have been executed so far in relation to the protest movement that has swept Iran since the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in September. Some warnings of imminent executions have proved false, possibly because protests around specific prisoners have unnerved the authorities.

Iranian ambassadors in Europe are still being summoned over the execution of two men on Saturday, and Iran is now having to weigh up whether to ignore the international condemnation over the lack of due process, including prisoners being denied access to lawyers of their choice.

On Monday, a daughter of the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was sentenced to five years over propaganda and acts against national security for encouraging people to join the protests.

Faezeh Hashemi, 60, a former lawmaker and womens rights activist, was charged with collusion against national security, propaganda against the Islamic republic and disturbing public order by participating in illegal gatherings, her lawyer said.

The repression, which is seen by the Iranian authorities as an appropriate response to injuries inflicted on security officers during the protests, is stifling any chances of the talks of a renewed nuclear deal, pushing part of the Iranian regime to look for closer relations with Russia as an alternative to the west.

Over the weekend the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, attended memorials in Toronto for the 176 people killed on Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 that was shot down by Irans Revolutionary Guards on 8 January 2020.

Trudeau said the Tehran regime did not represent its people, a position that takes him closer to expelling Iranian diplomats from Canada, one of the key demands of the protestors in the large and increasingly unified Iranian diaspora.

The execution of two men, Mohammad Mehdi Karami and Mohammad Hosseini, on Saturday led to protests around the world, but no immediate sanctions.

The French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, described the executions as appalling, adding that France reiterated its opposition to the death penalty, in all places and in all circumstances. French senators have also tabled a resolution calling on the EU to end nuclear negotiations with Iran; designate the Revolutionary Guardsas a terrorist organisation; as well as several other measures.

The Canadian foreign minister, Mlanie Joly, also denounced the executions, saying: Two more lives lost to senseless executions from the Iranian regime. Calling on Iran to put an end to such brutal and inhumane sentences, Joly expressed solidarity with Iranians who have a right to their human rights.

Nasrin Sotoudeh, a lawyer and human rights activist in Iran, said due process had not been allowed, turning the executions into open murder.

The Iranian foreign ministry rejected the criticism, saying: Remarks of self-styled defenders of human rights are replete with racist thoughts.

Iranian judicial news agencies reported that Saleh Mirhashemi, a karate champion, had been sentenced to death, along with two others. Amir Nasr Azadani, a former football player, was sentenced to 26 years in prison.

The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution meanwhile slammed the door on relaxing rules around the hijab, saying in a lengthy statement that western societies had destroyed the family by promoting female sexuality. Covering up causes a woman to be recognised in society by her thoughts and personality, not by her body and beauty, it said. This is the greatest service that religions, especially Islam, have given to women, which obliges her to observe hijab so that her dignity is preserved and she is not sold or passed around like a commodity.

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Protesters gather at Iranian prison in attempt to stop imminent ...

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Iran's Regime Is Already a Big Loser at the World Cup - Bloomberg

Paris Iranian students have clashed with security forces at a top Tehran university amid the wave of unrest sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, state media and rights groups said Monday. Kurdish Iranian Amini, 22, was pronounced dead on September 16, days after she was detained for allegedly breaching rules forcing women to wear hijab headscarves and modest clothes, sparking Iran's biggest wave of protests in almost three years.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, finally broke his silence on the chaos in his country Monday, telling a group of police cadets that the U.S. and Israel were behind the "rioting" in Iran. Khamenei called Amini's death "a sad incident" that "left us heartbroken," but condemned the protests as a "planned" foreign plot to destabilize the country.

"This rioting was planned," he told cadets gathered in Tehran. "I say clearly that these riots and insecurities were designed by America and the Zionist regime, and their employees... Such actions are not normal, are unnatural."

Outside rights groups say more than 80 people have been killed since Iran's security forces started cracking down on the protests, with some members of the forces among the dead.

Concern grew over violence at Sharif University of Technology overnight where, local media reported, riot police confronted hundreds of students, using tear gas and paintballs and carrying weapons that shoot non-lethal steel pellets.

"Woman, life, liberty," students shouted, as well as "students prefer death to humiliation", the Iranian Mehr news agency reported, adding that the country's science minister later came to speak to the students in an effort to calm the situation.

The Oslo-based group Iran Human Rights posted video apparently showing Iranian police on motorcycles pursuing running students in an underground car park and, in a separate clip, taking away detainees whose heads were covered in black cloth bags.

In other video, which could not be independently verified, shooting and screaming can be heard as large numbers of people run down a street at night.

"Security forces have attacked Sharif University in Tehran tonight. Shooting can be heard," IHR said in a Twitter message Sunday.

In another video clip, a crowd of people can be heard chanting: "Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid! We are all together!" IHR said the video was taken at Shariati metro station in the capital Tehran on Sunday.

The New York-based group Center for Human Rights in Iran said it was "extremely concerned by videos coming out of Sharif University and Tehran today showing violent repression of protests + detainees being hauled away with their heads completely covered in fabric."

Mehr news agency said that "Sharif University of Technology announced that due to recent events and the need to protect students ... all classes will be held virtually from Monday."

Since the unrest started on September 16, dozens of protesters have been killed and more than a thousand arrested. Members of the security forces have been among those killed.

As CBS News correspondent Roxana Saberi reported over the weekend, the anti-government protests have entered their third week despite severe internet restrictions and a heavy-handed crackdown by Iran's security forces aimed at quashing the upheaval.

And while Iranian women have taken part in other nationwide protests, Saberi said this time, the spark for the unrest was a woman's death and it was a female journalist Niloufar Hamedi of the Shargh daily, who broke the story.

Hamedi was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison for her work. She is one of at least 19 journalists, including seven women, who have been detained across the country since the protests began, according to Reporters Without Borders. The Center for Human Rights in Iran puts the figure at25 or higher.

"This is the first time that women in a large number, standing shoulder to shoulder with men, are burning their headscarves," Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist who fled Iran in 2009 and is now based in New York, noted told CBS News.

The headscarf or hijab "is the main pillar of the Islamic Republic," said Alinejad, who runs an online campaign called "My Stealthy Freedom" that shares images of women and girls in Iran flouting the hijab rules.

She said Iranian women "strongly believe that by burning headscarves, they're actually shaking the regime."

In the decades before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Saberi said women were commonly seen on the streets of Iran dressed in both the hijab and in thelatest Western fashions. But soon after the revolution, the new Islamic regime ruled that women and girls from a young age had to cover their hair and bodies in public. Hardliners proclaimed the hijab would protect women's honor, but for many protesters, it has remained a powerful symbol of oppression.

The women who've been demonstrating want to have the choice of whether or not to wear the hijab, according to Azadeh Pourzand, co-founder of the US-based Siamak Pourzand Foundation, promoting the freedom of expression in Iran.

"It's about essentially women feeling humiliated and women feeling forced to do something that they may or may not want to do," said Pourzand, who is also a PhD researcher at the University of London focusing on women's activism in Iran.

While Iranian women have pushed for legal reforms for years, very little has been achieved, she said. Women are present in society, particularly in higher education, but family and employment laws remain deeply discriminatory toward women, as do norms and practices, she said.

Pourzand said the ongoing protests have united Iranians across different ages, ethnicities and cities. Demonstrators are calling not only for women's rights, but also protesting against political repression more broadly, and mismanagement and corruption that have left Iran isolated globally, and its economy flailing.

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Iran protests escalate: Rights group says "shooting heard" as security ...