Iranian authorities fired live ammunition to disperse protesters in Tehran on Sunday night, wounding several people, according to witness accounts provided to the Guardian and footage circulating on social media. Hundreds of protesters had defied a heavy security presence in the Iranian capital to hold vigils and demonstrations after the government belatedly admitted its own forces had shot downa Ukraine International Airlines passenger jet last Wednesday, killing all 176 people on board. There were fresh protests on Monday in at least two universities in the country. Though campus protests are not unusual in Iran, they come during a period of extraordinary tumult in the Islamic Republic, with an economy suffocated by US sanctions, the largest protests in the regime’s history crushed by violent force in November, and popular revulsion that the country’s armed forces shot down a jet loaded with Iranian citizens – then denied doing so. Analysts said the renewed protests were still concentrated among the restive middle classes and students and not an existential threat to the government. But the backlash had wiped out any momentum the government had hoped to gain from the outpouring of grief and rage that followed the killing of Gen Qassem Suleimani by a US drone strike on 3 January, and Iran’s missile strikes on American forces in Iraq five days later. “It was thought they would have gotten a break, but they have … ruined it for themselves,” said Dina Esfandiary, an Iran specialist at the Century Foundation thinktank. A witness told the Guardian that groups, many led by women, gathered in Tehran’s central Azadi Square on Sunday evening wearing masks and scarves to hide their identities, confronting riot police and officers in plain clothes.