Videos verified by BBC Persian show protests in the central city of Lordegan, the capital Tehran and Marvdasht in the southern Fars province taking place on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Fars reported that in Lordegan two people were killed, citing an informed official. The report did not specify whether those killed were protesters or members of the security forces.<\/p>\n
Rights group Hengaw said the two killed were protesters, naming them as Ahmad Jalil and Sajjad Valamanesh.<\/p>\n
BBC Persian has not been able to independently verify the deaths.<\/p>\n
Separately state media said a member of the security forces linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) was killed in clashes with protesters on Wednesday night in the city of Kudasht, in the western Lorestan province. <\/p>\n
The BBC has not been able to verify this and protesters say the man was one of their number and was shot dead by the security forces. <\/p>\n
A further 13 police officers and Basij members were injured by stone throwing in the area, the state media report said.<\/p>\n
Schools, universities and public institutions were closed across the country on Wednesday after a bank holiday was declared by authorities in an apparent effort to quell the unrest. <\/p>\n
It was ostensibly to save energy because of the cold weather, though it was seen by many Iranians as an attempt to contain the protests.<\/p>\n
They began in Tehran – among shopkeepers angered by another sharp fall in the value of the Iranian currency against the US dollar on the open market.<\/p>\n
By Tuesday, university students were involved and they had spread to several cities, with people chanting against the country’s clerical rulers.<\/p>\n
The protests have been the most widespread since an uprising in 2022 sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was accused by morality police of not wearing her veil properly. But they have not been on the same scale.<\/p>\n
To prevent any escalation, tight security is now reported in the areas of Tehran where the demonstrations began.<\/p>\n
President Masoud Pezeshkian has said his government will listen to the “legitimate demands” of the protesters.<\/p>\n
But the prosecutor general, Mohammad Movahedi-Azad, has also warned that any attempt to create instability would be met with what he called a “decisive response”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Videos verified by BBC Persian show protests in the central city of Lordegan, the capital Tehran and Marvdasht…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-347000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}