Gathering the news about Iran's 2009 National election in one place.

Iran says British embassy detainees stirred unrest / Rights group suggests at least 2,000 arrests

Iran says British embassy detainees stirred unrest: Via AP on Yahoo! News.

Witnesses who spoke with the AP said they did not spot Mousavi at the rally. But one of his close assistants addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker and other opposition figures also appeared, including reformist presidential candidate Mahdi Karroubi.

Sunday's clashes erupted at a rally that had been planned to coincide with a memorial held each year for Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, who came to be considered a martyr in the Islamic Republic after he was killed in a major anti-regime bombing in 1981.

Iranian authorities say 17 protesters and eight members of the volunteer Basij militia have been killed in two weeks of unrest, and that hundreds of people have been arrested.

The Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights said its information suggests at least 2,000 arrests have been made

— "not just (people) arrested and later released, but who are locked up in prison," the group's vice president, Abdol Karim Lahidji, told the AP.

He said his information came from members of human rights groups in Iran and other contacts inside the country.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband denounced the detentions as "quite unacceptable" and dismissed Iranian allegations that embassy staff were involved in protests as "wholly without foundation."

Read Original Article:(Via AP on Yahoo! News.)

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