The Iranian police say a video that appears to show a police pickup truck running over a protester was faked, the Iranian news agency ISNA reported Thursday.

The police statement was responding to the circulation on the Internet of an amateur video said to have been taken Sunday during large antigovernment demonstrations in Tehran. The video shows a pickup truck running over a man; other screaming protesters then run to him after the truck drives off. Another video, said to be shot at the same time, shows people carrying the limp body of a man whose head is covered with blood.

The police statement said that no deaths had been reported in the “Valiasr area”; the videos appear to have been shot in Valiasr Square.

The police statement did say that two people were killed Sunday by a Nissan sport utility vehicle, not a police car, in a different area of the city and that the authorities had seized the vehicle. The police did not say who they thought was driving the vehicle.

In June, when protests erupted after the disputed presidential election, a video of Neda Agha-Soltan, a 26-year-old woman who was shot and killed, circulated widely on the Internet and became a symbol of the government’s violent repression. That video helped rally the opposition.

In what appeared to be an indication of the political sensitivity of the new video, an opposition Web site said that a reporter who had questioned Iran’s top police official during a news conference was threatened with arrest.

It was impossible to independently verify the events in the video. Foreign journalists were barred from covering the demonstrations.

The Jaras Web site also reported on Thursday that a man named Shahrokh Rahmani was run over by a police vehicle, but it gave no indication of how it got that information or whether he was the man in the video. The Web site reported that his family had been warned not to speak to the media.

The clashes on Sunday were the bloodiest since June. The police confirmed the deaths of at least eight people in Tehran, but the opposition said the figure was much higher.

There were reports of clashes on Thursday in Tehran. Reuters reported that pro-government demonstrators had been shown on state television wearing white shrouds and carrying signs with the words “We are ready to sacrifice our lives for the leader,” referring to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Also on Thursday, The Associated Press said that Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah of Iran, was urging nations to withdraw their ambassadors from Iran to protest the crackdown.

Source: NYtimes