TEHRAN: Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards said Sunday that defeated presidential candidates — Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi — and former President Mohammad Khatami should be tried for inciting unrest.
The June 12 presidential election plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 revolution, exposed deepening divisions in its ruling elite and set off a wave of protests that left 26 people dead.
“If Mousavi, Karoubi and Khatami are main suspects behind the soft revolution in Iran, which they are, we expect the judiciary ... to go after them, arrest them, put them on trial and punish them,” said Yadollah Javan, a senior Guards commander, the official IRNA news agency reported.
Protests gripped Tehran and other cities after the vote, which moderates say was rigged to secure the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but officials say it was the “healthiest” vote in the past 30 years. Hundreds of people were arrested in postelection violence.
In an attempt to calm widespread anger, Iran jailed the head of the Kahrizak detention center after at least three people died in custody in the southern Tehran prison as the judiciary held trials of detainees arrested over the unrest.
“The head of the center has been sacked and jailed. Three policemen who beat detainees have been jailed as well,” IRNA quoted Iran’s police chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam as saying.
Kahrizak was built for jailing violators of Iran’s vice laws. A police statement issued on Thursday confirmed that serious violations took place at Kahrizak.
Ahmadi-Moghaddam also confirmed that some postelection detainees had been tortured in Kahrizak prison, which supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered closed in July for “lack of necessary standards” to preserve the rights of prisoners.
Authorities say the voter unrest detainees have been transferred to Tehran’s Evin Prison, where many political prisoners are held. They also say some 200 postelection protesters remain imprisoned, including senior pro-reform politicians, journalists, activists and lawyers.
Iranian prosecutor Qorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi said all necessary legal measures would be taken against those “who had violated the law” in Kahrizak, the Etemad-e Melli newspaper reported.
Mousavi and Khatami have called for the immediate release of detainees, saying their confessions were made under duress.
In an attempt to uproot the opposition and to end street protests, Iran held two mass trials of moderates, including several prominent figures charged with offenses that included acting against national security by fomenting voter unrest.
An Iranian Revolutionary Court on Saturday charged a French woman, two Iranians working for the British and French embassies in Tehran and dozens of others with spying and assisting a Western plot to overthrow the government.
Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi on Sunday urged Tehran to release detained activists and citizens, saying the president must “listen to the people’s voice.”
Ebadi said in an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul that police tortured some detainees to death, and that one prison was even given permission by the government to torture. She did not explain how she knew this.
