Anti-government Iranian protesters gathered for demonstrations across the country for the third day in a row, calling for regime change following the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet shortly after it took off from a Tehran airport.
In Isfahan and Tehran, protesters gathered outside of universities on Monday chanting “Clerics get lost!”, while riot police were deployed to the surrounding areas.
Protesters accused Iran’s government of killing the nation’s “elites” and ‘replacing them’ with fanatical clerics.
“They killed our elites and replaced them with clerics,” some demonstrators chanted in Tehran Monday, referencing the Iranian students killed in the downing of the Ukrainian passenger plane. Many of the 176 people killed in the destruction of the plane had been Iranian students flying back to Canada to resume their studies after visiting Iran.
On Sunday, thousands of protesters gathered across Iran to call for the removal of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after Iran’s admission it had accidentally shot down the passenger plane. The demonstrations were a continuation of protests against the downing which broke out on Saturday.
The protests over Iran’s downing of the airliner are just the latest in a series of anti-government demonstrations, which began last November, initially to protest fuel price hikes.
