Mir Hussein Moussavi published two letters on his website on Thursday decrying the violence being carried out by the Basij. In one letter, he said an otherwise peaceful day of protest last Monday had been sullied when seven people were killed, although he did not name the Basij directly. Calling the vigilantes the “disciples of fraud and lies”, he said they... spread fear and chaos and... give the police an excuse to crack down on peaceful demonstrators.

In the second letter, to the National Security Council, he went further in depicting the vigilantes’ role as agents provocateurs. Saying that the Basijis lack uniforms, proper identification or anything that denotes them as public employees, he said they appeared with hoses, clubs, iron bars, truncheons and sometimes firearms.

The demonstration planned for Friday by Ansar Hezbollah is expected to march on the Expediency Council, a Government oversight body run by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.