The Iranian Government declared an outright election victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday morning, and riot police officers fought with supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, who insisted that the election had been stolen.

After a mostly quiet morning in Tehran, Moussavi supporters began filtering onto the streets. By early afternoon, thousands had come together, many of them wearing the trademark green of his campaign, chanting angrily that they would fight on as Moussavi had urged them to do on Friday night when he claimed that he had won and that there had been voting “irregularities”.

“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin,” Moussavi said during a news conference with reporters just after 11 pm on Friday, adding: “It is our duty to defend people’s votes. There is no turning back”.

A statement posted on Moussavi’s website on Saturday morning urged his supporters to resist a “governance of lie and dictatorship”.

But the Iranian authorities moved quickly to head off any concerted street demonstrations. Thousands of police officers could be seen moving into central Tehran, charging straight into the biggest concentrations of protesters.

Iran’s Interior Ministry said on Saturday that final results gave Ahmadinejad 62.6 per cent of the vote, with Moussavi getting just 33.7 per cent. The ministry says turnout was a record 85 per cent of eligible voters.

Though there was no word of Moussavi’s whereabouts on Saturday, statements on his website made clear that he was contesting the official line.

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