TEHRAN: Iran’s interior minister asked security agencies on Saturday to protect campaigners in the presidential election, after unidentified men beat up a speaker at a reformist rally in the holy city of Qom. Newspaper photographs showed Behzad Nabavi with a black eye and cuts on his head from the attack on Thursday after a rally that he said had been disrupted by people using teargas.

“I haven’t been beaten like this since the days of SAVAK,” Mr Nabavi, a leftist stalwart of the 1979 revolution, told a news conference. SAVAK was the Shah’s secret police.

Mr Nabavi, a former deputy parliament speaker, is a supporter of Mostafa Moin, the leading reformist candidate in the June 17 election. The campaign had previously been relatively free of violence.

“Apparently in recent days there is an order from certain centres of power for organised physical confrontation with Moin’s campaign meetings,” Nabavi said.—Reuters