About 50 people -- mostly Iranian-American college students -- assembled in front of the University of Pittsburgh's William Pitt Union yesterday to protest the results of last Friday's Iranian presidential election, widely regarded by analysts as a sham.

"I'm trying to tell Iranians that ... we're supporting them and we want democracy and freedom in Iran," said Roya Fereidouni, a psychology student at Pitt.

In Iran, mass protests continued for the fourth consecutive day, as main opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi called on his supporters to mourn the lives lost in the demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, dressed mostly in black, gathered in Tehran. Meanwhile, the Iranian Guardian Council announced its decision to meet with the three losing candidates to address their complaints, a move many of the Oakland protesters viewed with skepticism.

"[Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is just stalling," said Omid Moghimi, a chemistry student at Pitt. "They're just hoping that people are not going to be able to stay there that long and keep the protests up."

Demonstrators gathered in Oakland for more than two hours, chanting, "Down with dictator," in Farsi and English. They called for democracy in Iran and sang the Iranian national anthem.

"We're calling for basically the same thing that the people in Iran are calling for, which is an annulment and a do-over of the elections and an immediate end to the violence against protesters in Iran," said Amir Moghimi, a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dorna Javadi, an optometrist from Pittsburgh who traveled to Iran last month, said most Iranians strongly supported Mr. Mousavi in the weeks before the election.

"Everybody believed it was going to be Mousavi," she said. "There's no way it could have been [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad."

Ms. Fereidouni agrees, citing Mr. Ahmadinejad's total share of the votes, more than 60 percent, as unbelievable. According to official election results, Mr. Mousavi won 33.75 percent.

"I have a lot of family and relatives in Iran and they all said that there is so much support for Mousavi," she said. "When [Ahmadinejad] won with that big of a margin, that was really a big sign that ... this was not an election, it was a selection."

"How the Iranian government is dealing with this is absolutely wrong," Omid Moghimi said. "The way that they're treating peaceful protests with violence and the way that they are afraid of any international reporters from covering any of this stuff ... goes against every ideology that they claim the Islamic Republic and democracy to stand for."