Students at Iranian universities staged new demonstrations, while many shop owners went on strike on November 5, despite increasing repression by the authorities, the Iranian service of Radio Svaboda reports.

The protests, which broke out in connection with the death of a 22-year-old woman after being tortured by the police, have been going on for two months.

Mahsa Amini

died in September after being arrested by Iran's morality police for "improperly" wearing the obligatory Islamic headscarf, or hijab.

Her death, which officials said was a heart attack, sparked a wave of anti-government protests in cities across the country, which the authorities met with a brutal crackdown.

The Iran Human Rights Group, based in Oslo, Norway, said at least 277 people had been killed, including 40 children.

Security forces used new measures to quell protests at universities in the capital Tehran on November 5, searching students and forcing them to remove their masks.

Students were subject to dress code checks at the northern Tehran branch of Azad University and Sharif University of Technology, a leading institution of higher learning and a traditional hotbed of dissent.

In a video released by BBC Persian, students were seen chanting: "I'm a free woman, you're a pervert" at the Islamic Azad University of Mashhad in northeast Iran.

"A student dies, but does not accept humiliation," chanted the students of Gilan University in the northern city of Rasht in footage published on the Internet by one of the activists.

Dozens of people chanted similar slogans at a mourning ceremony 40 days after the death of protester

Javad Heydari

in the northwestern city of Qazvin.

People watched the "expansion of the strike" in Amini's hometown of Saqez, in Iran's Kurdistan province.

Shops in the city closed in protest, according to the Norwegian human rights group Hengaw.