TEHRAN – Iran has arrested several people over the tearing up of a picture of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, during anti-government demonstrations last week, a senior official said yesterday.
The detentions were announced a day after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a stern warning to the pro-reform opposition, accusing it of violating the law by insulting the memory of the late revolutionary leader Khomeini.
Tension has increased in Iran after student backers of opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi clashed in Tehran with police on December 7th in the largest such protests over the June 12th disputed presidential election in months.
State television has broadcast footage of what it said were opposition supporters tearing up and trampling on a picture of Khomeini during the rallies, when pro-reform students sought to renew their challenge to hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The opposition has denied involvement in the reported incident, suggesting the authorities were planning to use it as a pretext for a renewed post-election crackdown on dissent.
“Those people who were at the site have all been identified,” Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadai said, quoted by ISNA news agency.
He said arrests had been made, including one on the day of the student rallies, without giving names or numbers.
The prosecutor also said there would be “no mercy towards those who insulted the founder of the revolution”, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Khomeini spearheaded the 1979 Islamic revolution and remains revered in Iran. He died in 1989.
On Sunday, some moderate websites suggested Mr Mousavi, who says the June 12th presidential poll was rigged to secure Mr Ahmadinejad’s re-election, may be arrested. Mr Mousavi has branded the Khomeini picture incident “very suspicious”.
A cleric representing Mr Khamenei in the elite Revolutionary Guards suggested the authorities had been too soft on the reformist opposition and its media in the past.
“If we had broken the pens of men of letters and had erected gallows, they would not have assailed our beliefs in this way,” IRNA quoted Mojtaba Zolnour as saying. – (Reuters)