Violent riots as Ahmadinejad declares Iran elections 2009 victory

Al-Arabiya reports three opposition supporters killed in clashes with police

Up to 3,000 Mousavi supporters took part in the protests after Mousavi was defeated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent president.

Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili, reporting from Tehran, said major streets in the north of the capital had come to a standstill.

"Coming up the street there were running battles happening between riot police and students and there were refuse bins alight in the middle of the road," he said. 

"I saw riot police hitting student's with sticks. I saw students - or young people - throwing stones at the riot police, trying to knock them off their motorcycles.

"But you didn't get a sense that there was any kind of organised movement in this."

At 3 p.m. local time, many shopkeepers in the area had shuttered or barred their businesses; others watched from storefronts with shutters lowered half-way, in case they needed to close in a hurry. Plainclothes police were also on the streets.

“I feel like I went to sleep in one country and woke up in another,” as the peaceful rallies staged by opposition supporters in the last week gave way to violent suppression of dissent on Saturday. Her report includes footage of Mr. Moussavi’s defiant press conference on Friday night, and the text of his statement on Saturday, in which he said: “The result of what I see from such a performance by dishonest people is shaking the pillars of the Islamic Republic and the rule of deception and dictatorship.”

"The democracy is dead in Iran, by these elections. … It is some kind of catastrophe, by this large fraud," said journalist Tahere Eibodi, as she stood outside the campaign headquarters of Ahmadinjeda's principal opponent, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, a relative moderate who attracted intense support from many young people.

"They cheated and rigged the election," Saeed Laylaz, a prominent reform economist and adviser to Mousavi, said by telephone.

The two other candidates in the race were Mohsen Rezaie, former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and reformist cleric Mahdi Karroubi, a two-time speaker of Iran’s parliament. Both received miniscule percentages of the vote.