Vice-chancellor accused of sexual assault on student
AP and other media are reporting a sizeable protest over the weekend at Zanjan University in Iran. It came as a response to an apparent sexual assault of a female student by the school’s vice chancellor. Students called for his resignation, as well as that of the school’s board of directors, according to Agence France Presse.
Estimates of the crowd’s size range from hundreds to thousands. AFP and the National Council of Resistance of Iran pegged the turnout at 3,000. It was unclear in media reports which group, if any, was responsible for organizing the protest. The university is in the northwestern city of Zanjan, about 300 kilometres from Tehran.
Students allegedly broke into the vice chancellor’s office after hearing that he had assaulted the student, and they turned him in to security forces. Etemad, the daily newspaper that first reported the story, wrote that the vice chancellor tried to shut down the Islamic students’ association on campus “under the pretext that its members have moral problems and do not have an Islamic behaviour.”
The Los Angeles Times links to a YouTube video that reportedly shows students catching the administrator red-handed: