Amid crackdown, violence grips Tehran

Separately, state-run media reported that three people were wounded when a suicide bomber attacked the Tehran shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the southern part of the city, several miles from the scheduled protests. The report of the blast could not be independently confirmed.

The violence unfolded on a day of extraordinary tension across Iran. The opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, appeared at a demonstration in southern Tehran and called for a general strike if he were to be arrested. “I am ready for martyrdom,’’ he said.

Mousavi again called for nullifying the election’s results, and opposition protesters swore to continue pressing their claims of a stolen election against Iran’s embattled and increasingly impatient clerical leadership in Iran’s worst crisis since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

In Washington, President Obama called the government’s reaction “violent and unjust,’’ and, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., warned again that the world was watching what happened in Tehran.

Iran’s divisions played out on the streets. Regular security forces stood back and urged protesters to go home and avoid bloodshed, while the feared pro-government militia, the Basij, beat protesters with clubs and, witnesses said, electric prods.

In some places, the protesters pushed back, rushing the militia in teams of hundreds: At least three Basijis were pitched from their motorcycles, which were then set on fire. The protesters included many women, some of whom berated as cowards men who fled the Basijis.

The street violence appeared to grow more intense as night fell, and there were unconfirmed reports of multiple deaths. A BBC journalist at Enghelab Square reported seeing one person shot by security forces. An amateur video posted on YouTube showed a woman bleeding to death after being shot by a Basiji, the text posted with the video said.

“If they open fire on people and if there is bloodshed, people will get angrier,’’ said a protester, Ali, 40. “They are out of their minds if they think with bloodshed they can crush the movement.’’

Obama’s statement was his strongest to date on the post-election turmoil in Iran. Saying that “each and every innocent life’’ lost would be mourned, he added: “Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

“Martin Luther King once said: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.’’

Journalists were banned from leaving their offices to report on the protests. A reporter from an American news organization said she had been called by a member of the Basij militia warning her not to go to the venue for the rally because the situation would be dangerous and there could be fatalities.

The authorities were also reported yesterday to have renewed an offer of a partial recount of the ballots in the disputed election - an offer that the opposition has previously rejected. A letter from Mousavi published on one of his websites late yesterday repeated his demand for the election to be annulled.

“The Iranian nation will not believe this unjust and illegal’’ act, he said in the letter, which was addressed to the powerful Guardian Council, a panel of clerics that oversees and certifies election results. Making his case for electoral fraud, he charged that thousands of his representatives had been expelled from polling stations and some mobile polling stations had ballot boxes filled with fake ballots.

In a long and hard-line sermon on Friday, Khamenei declared the June 12 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad valid and warned that demonstration leaders “would be responsible for bloodshed and chaos’’ if demonstrations continued.