Protesting Students Abducted By Plainclothesmen In Iran

At least ten students at Tehran’s College of Arts were abducted on Saturday morning by plainclothes agents and taken to an unknown location after days of protests.

Iran's Student Union Council reported that the students were detained while the police special guards were deployed around the campus. One eyewitness tweeted that around 40 male and female agents showed up in cars and vans before the abduction.

According to the council, there is no information about the whereabouts of the detained students.

They had begun a sit-in protest on Wednesday against new, stricter hijab rules with several of them seriously injured in the early hours of Thursday by the head of security at the college.

According to the popular Telegram channel of the National Student Unions Council, Hamzeh Borzouei attacked a group of students and seriously injured several.

Students said on social media that Borzouei and other university officials made various threats against them including the threat of calling in the military to deal with them.

The new rules require women to wear a pullover headscarf with stitched front (called Maghna’e in Iran) which is like a nun’s coif, completely covering the head and the neck. Failing to comply, the university has announced, would result in suspension.

In the early 1980s wearing Maghna’e became compulsory in all universities, government offices and even banks but its use gradually became obsolete in some more lenient establishments including the College of Arts.

Angered by the detention of their colleagues, the students of the universities of Art and Tehran expressed solidarity with their colleagues.

“The policy of maximum repression, which has intensified in universities at the end of the academic year, will eventually fail like the other forms of repression,” read their statement published on Friday.

“Until the last moment, we stand against all these repressive measures,” stressed the students.

Meanwhile, the students of Soore University in Tehran also expressed solidarity with the protests at Tehran’s College of Arts in a separate statement.

On Friday, at least 80 students from Madani University in Tabriz, northwest of Iran, were also summoned for supporting the protests.

Iran's Student Union Council reported that the students were summoned to the disciplinary committee and campus security issued restraining orders to several students in the last days of the academic year.

“The Disciplinary Committee of Azarbaijan Madani University has issued final verdicts for 20 students, 25 students are waiting for the meeting of the committee and the issuance of the verdict, and 35 students have been summoned for the hearing,” adds the report.

The Council says 20 students have received sentences of "suspension for half a year" and "temporary suspension".

The students of Madani University announced in a statement that they will remain united and resist the mounting pressure.

In recent months, authorities have increased pressure on students for hijab, presumably to stop the growth of the anti-compulsory hijab movement in universities across the country.

The National Student Unions Council said in April that 435 students had been suspended or expelled in universities nationwide, where they had staged many protests and sit-ins since the beginning of the Mahsa movement last year.