French police detain 20 at banned Iran opposition rally
French police arrested around 20 people in Paris on Saturday as several hundred demonstrators defied an official ban to protest repression and executions in Iran.
Several buses arrived at Place Vauban in central Paris despite police having banned the rally the previous evening.
Justifying their decision, the authorities had cited concerns about potential clashes with regime supporters "in the current particularly tense national and international context".
Hundreds of protesters gathered for the demonstration aimed to raise awareness about a wave of executions in Iran during the Middle East conflict, an AFP correspondent saw.
Protesters chanted "Down with the dictatorship in Iran" and "French government, shame on you".
Some held up portraits of Iranians executed by Tehran's authorities.
Police broke the gathering using pepper spray, Afchine Alavi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), one Iranian opposition group, told AFP.
"They arrested about 20 people for no reason," he said, adding that around 12 people had been injured. There had been no violence from the protesters, he insisted.
One protester, Shokouleh Majd, denounced the ban on the demo.
It's not us, it's the mullahs who are the terrorists," she said. And it's us who are prevented from demonstrating to denounce the executions in Iran."
The NCRI is the political arm of the People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI, also known by its Persian acronym MEK), which is designated a "terrorist" group by Iran.
The group has organised numerous protests in Paris without incident, including in recent months during nationwide anti-government demonstrations in Iran and the US-Israeli conflict with the Islamic Republic.
Organisers filed an emergency motion to overturn the ban but a Paris court upheld it on Saturday.
The protest was organised by Iranian diaspora groups, as well as French and international NGOs.
Rights groups said more than 40 people have been executed in Iran since the war began, many of them people linked to the protests that broke out prior to the war.
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