28 Dec, 2009, Tehran, Iran

About fifteen anti-government protesters, including nephew of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Iran’s opposition leader, were shot dead as the smouldering confrontation between the regime and the so-called Green Movement finally erupted.

The Ministry of Intelligence said that more than 10 from the dead were members of anti-revolutionary terrorist groups. The Analysts heralded the start of what could be the bloody endgame as hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters poured on to the streets of Tehran and many other cities and fought running battles with security forces. The Opposition websites claimed that some policemen had refused to fire on the demonstrators.

The Foreign journalists have been banned from Iran but the Western newsrooms were inundated with mobile telephone footage of astonishing scenes.

The demonstrators’ fury was not directed only at the President Ahmadinejad, whose alleged theft of presidential election triggered the protests in June, but also at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader and embodiment of a theocratic government that has lost legitimacy. Passions were bound to be high because yesterday was not only the Ashura, when Shias commemorate the martyrdom in the 7th century of Imam Hossein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, but also the seventh day since the death of Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the opposition’s spiritual leader, an important date in Shia mourning rituals.