Iran stops students travelling to join Hizbollah

TEHRAN, July 29 (Reuters) Iranian authorities have stopped at the border a group of hardline students who on Wednesday left Tehran to join Hizbollah's war against Israeli forces in Lebanon, the students said today.

The student group representing the 200 who left overland for Lebanon sent a fax to Reuters saying they had been stopped at the Turkish border on Thursday evening.

The students were staging a sit-down protest at the border but police were refusing to give them food or water.

Iranian hardliners have made great public show of recruiting volunteers for ''martyrdom-seeking operations'' in recent years.

But there is no record of any of these Iranian volunteers taking part in attacks in Iraq or Israel.

Iranian officials have repeatedly said such groups have no official sanction and add that they were tolerated only ''as long as their ideas are limited to theory''.

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