On a side street near northwest Tehran's Mohseni Square, helmeted hard-line Ansar Hezbollah militiamen on motorcycles rhythmically beat their batons on their riot shields as they prepared to attack a gathering crowd of protesters. "God is great!" they chanted. "God praise Hezbollah!"
After midnight in the Jordan neighborhood, motorcycle riot police in body armor chased protesters and passers-by, striking men and women. Teary teenagers fled, clutching their backs or arms in agony.
"They broke my head! They broke my head!" one man screamed as he ran, gripping his bloodied forehead.
The pop-pop-pop of tear-gas canisters could be heard amid the chaos. Police dragged demonstrators into waiting vans.
Some protesters fought back fiercely. For at least 15 minutes, Ansar Hezbollah militiamen and young men fought for control of a pedestrian bridge over a major highway. At one point a group of militiamen surrounded a fallen protester and began pummeling him with batons. A hail of rocks forced them to retreat.
Beneath the bridge along the highway, drivers stopped their cars, leaned on their horns and shouted slogans in support of the protesters.
Over the past six presidential and parliamentary elections, moderate candidates fared well during times of high turnout while conservatives tended to win during low turnout. In 1997 and 2001, amid high voter participation, reformist Mousavi ally Mohammad Khatami coasted to victory over conservative rivals with more than 70 percent of the vote, while Ahmadinejad received 62 percent of the vote amid tepid 48 percent turnout in 2005.
His victory in an election with this year's 80 percent turnout would suggest that many who stayed home or voted for his opponent last time voted for him this year, a phenomenon that analysts consider unlikely.
The results also showed Ahmadinejad winning in the city of Tabriz, where a large, urbanized Azeri population was believed to strongly support fellow Azeri Mousavi, who drew huge crowds at rallies.
The electoral commission defied its own rules by certifying the vote before alleged irregularities were resolved.
Local broadcast outlets did not mention the protests or the claims of fraud by the Mousavi campaign. As police swarmed across the city, state-controlled television broadcast a self-help program, a show on acrobats, children's programming, a nature documentary and footage of a gray-bearded cleric giving religious counsel.
The vote suggests a further consolidation of power by hard-line elements of the country's security forces and Revolutionary Guard, who back Ahmadinejad, over clerics such as Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who were pillars of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and criticized by the president as corrupt during the campaign.
The Revolutionary Guard issued a statement two days before the election warning that it would crush any popular rebellion.
Now that he's won a second and final term, some suggested that Ahmadinejad might jettison the hard-line supporters he needed during the elections, moderate his rhetoric and policies and move to the center. But most say his rigid personality and ideological fervor make him incapable of such a shift.
