Iran Gathering Is Broken Up: Via NYTimes.com .

Thousands of people gathered in Tehran on Thursday to commemorate those killed in Iran’s post-election crackdown, but a vast deployment of police officers used tear gas and wooden batons to disperse them, in some of the largest and most violent street clashes in weeks.

The mourners gathered at the freshly dug graves of protesters, including Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman whose bloodied image has become an icon of the opposition movement. As the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi arrived at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, the police barred him from entering, and angry mourners chanted, “Neda lives! Ahmadinejad is dead!” referring to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, witnesses said.

Later, large crowds massed in several areas in central and northern Tehran, but riot police officers mostly beat them back, and there were reports of a number of arrests.

Opposition leaders had hoped for a vast and peaceful public outpouring, despite the withering summer heat and the Interior Ministry’s refusal to permit the gathering. Outrage over the deaths in prison of several protesters has spread to Iran’s hard-liners in recent days, and Thursday was a day of symbolic importance: the end of the 40-day mourning period after Ms. Agha-Soltan and others were killed.

But the authorities, after releasing 140 detainees on Tuesday in an apparent effort to defuse the issue, were equally determined to prevent a broad show of popular discontent. Hundreds of police officers surrounded the mourners at the cemetery, and riot police officers began gathering in force in central Tehran early in the day.

On Wednesday, the leader of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran, Abdullah Araghi, warned against any public mourning ritual, saying, “We are not joking — we will confront those who want to fight against the clerical establishment,” the semiofficial Fars news agency reported.

Some opposition supporters were heartened by the turnout on Thursday. “You see, they never thought this many people would turn out in the heat like this,” said a 45-year-old woman at the cemetery, where thick crowds of people chanted slogans deriding President Ahmadinejad as a dictator and calling on him to resign. “They can’t stop it now.”

On Thursday, Mohammad Khatami, the reformist former president, became the latest prominent figure to speak forcefully against prison deaths and abuses in the crackdown.

“Crimes have taken place, and people have died,” Mr. Khatami told a group of lawmakers. “Our people, young women and men, have been treated in ways that if it had taken place in foreign prisons, everyone would be screaming that it must be confronted.”

Conservative figures in Parliament have made similar comments, and at least two investigations of the prison abuses are under way. A number of senior hard-line figures attended a service on Tuesday for one of those who died in prison, Mohsen Ruholamini, the son of an adviser to Mohsen Rezai, a conservative presidential candidate, the Tabnak Web site reported.

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