Revolutionary Guard wants Mousavi tried over unrest

TEHRAN: Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard said on Sunday that opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi, a defeated presidential candidate and a former president should be tried for inciting unrest after a disputed presidential poll. The June 12 presidential polls plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 Is?la?mic revolution, exposed deepening rifts in its ruling elite and set off a wave of protests and arrests that left 26 people dead.

“If Mousavi, [defeated candidate Mehdi] Karoubi and [former President Mohammad] 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 Guard 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.

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 post-election 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 Thursday confirmed that serious violations took place at Kahrizak.

Leading moderates including Mousavi and Khatami have demanded the immediate re?lease of detainees, saying that 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 system of clerical rule.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner urged Iran to free the Frenchwoman, 24-year-old academic Clotilde Reiss, and rejected accusations against her of spying and helping a Western plot against Iran. “I want to clearly tell the Iranian authorities: these allegations are not true, Clotilde Reiss isn’t guilty of anything,” Kouchner said on LCI television.

“She did nothing but walk alongside protesters for an hour one time, and an hour and a half hours another time. She did not submit a report, she sent a brief note to the director of the French Institute for Iranian Research, which is a cultural institute,” he said, demanding she be freed.

In interviews aired Sunday, both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and National Security Adviser James Jones said Washington has little choice but to deal with the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, regardless of US feelings about charges he was re-elected in a fraudulent election and sympathy for the thousands who have protested the outcome.

Clinton said the US had no illusions that Iran would accept overtures to return to negotiations about its nuclear program and would not wait much longer for Tehran to respond.

Under the Obama administration, the US has been trying to entice Iran back to the negotiating table, while voicing criticism at the cloudy circumstances surrounding Ahmadinejad recent re-election.