Mr. Wheeler said the recent crackdowns were to be expected.
Further crackdowns were instituted against Czech theaters, with Mr. Havel blamed for the tightened restrictions.
Similar crackdowns were under way or about to start in the volatile southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, officials there said.
Party members seem to be keenly aware that that those who supported the crackdowns were quickly helicoptered into high-level positions.
The protests and forceful security crackdowns were not limited to Tehran, but also took place in other major cities, including Mashad, Shiraz, Isfahan, Rasht and Tabriz.
Mr. Villarreal, the Border Patrol spokesman, said the patrol's crackdowns were in keeping with its mission of securing the border against illegal immigration and smuggling.
Confiscated in the crackdowns were penknives, plastic picnic knives, nail cutters and files, paper cutters, knitting needles, screwdrivers, even sharp pens and blunt-nosed children's scissors.
But in July 2006, when Mrs. Encalada was pregnant with their third daughter and immigration crackdowns were sweeping the country, her husband was ordered by immigration authorities to take "voluntary departure" back to Ecuador.
Abbas Jafari-DolaTehran, Tehran's prosecutor general, said at the weekend that the recent crackdowns were part of two operations, Spider I and Spider II, aimed at identifying illicit modelling activities online.
In the United Arab Emirates, where the authoritarian government just sentenced 69 members of a Brotherhood-linked Islamist group to prison in an effort to stop the spread of Arab spring revolts, Islamists said the crackdowns were driving a deeper wedge into their movement.
The tensions with India that the crackdowns were meant to ease wavered earlier in the week, easing after Pakistan choked off militants' routes into the disputed territory of Kashmir but rising after a Western diplomat suggested that about 300 members of Al Qaeda were operating in the area.
