Iran's interior minister has asked security agencies to protect campaigners in Friday's presidential election after a speaker was beaten up at a reformist rally in Qom. Newspaper photographs showed Behzad Nabavi with a black eye and cuts on his head from the attack on Thursday after a rally that he said had been disrupted by people using teargas. "I haven't been beaten like this since the days of SAVAK," Nabavi, a leftist stalwart of the 1979 revolution, told a news conference. SAVAK was the Shah's secret police.Nabavi, a former deputy parliament speaker, is a supporter of Mostafa Moin, a leading reformist candidate in the 17 June election. The campaign had been relatively free of violence. "Apparently in recent days there is an order from certain centres of power for organised physical confrontation with Moin's campaign meetings," Nabavi said. "The fact that they used teargas and handcuffs ... shows they were members of parallel security and military entities."