Three journalists, one of them foreign, were arrested at Wednesday’s mass demonstrations in Tehran by a regime determined to suppress all independent sources of information.

Farhad Poulaid, an Iranian working for the French wire service AFP, was detained as he rode through central Tehran on a motorbike and nothing has been heard from him since. Nafiseh Zareh Kohan, an Iranian who writes for reformist publications, and Niels Krosgaard, 31, a Danish journalism student, were also held, the International Federation of Journalists said yesterday.

The arrests are part of a sustained crackdown on all independent media, foreign and domestic, in the five months since President Ahmadinejad’s hotly disputed re-election triggered the most serious unrest in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history.

The international press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders said: “At least a hundred journalists and cyberdissidents have been arrested since the election and 23 of them are still being held.” It said several journalists had been sentenced to as much as six years in prison after “Stalinist” show trials.

Western journalists are now barred from Iran, and some of the few who were based there before the election, including the BBC correspondent Jon Leyne, have been expelled. Maziar Bahari, a Canadian working for Newsweek, was held for 118 days before being released on bail and allowed to leave for London last month.

Opposition activists said the regime’s prime concern was to stop the spread of information inside Iran. “They want to make sure other parts of the country don’t understand the degree of discontent in Tehran,” said one.

“Ideologically unsound” journalists on the conservative Fars news agency have been replaced by inexperienced hardliners.

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