TEHRAN (IRNA) -- The Islamic Association of Tehran University Students on Sunday held special ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of the anti-U.S. protests in which three students were martyred.

The students gathered at the very spot where the students staged their protest in 1953.

About one thousand students took part in the ceremony chanting slogans for freedom of expression and the release of political prisoners.

The Basiji university students (volunteer forces) held a separate meeting at Shahid Chamran Technical Faculty of Tehran University to mark the occasion.

Students Mostafa Bozorg-nia, Mahdi Shariat Razavi and Nasser Qandchi were martyred by the deposed regime’s police when they had joined a demonstration to protest a plan to confer an honorary doctorate degree to Richard Nixon (vice-president in the Eisenhower administration) from Tehran University during his visit to Tehran in 1953.

Nixon was due to celebrate the U.S.-engineered coup that toppled the popular government of the then-prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq four months earlier in 1953 for which the United States spent $21 million.