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Iran: Cleric calls for savage punishment for protesters
[ADN Kronos] One of the most powerful clerics in Iran, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, has called for "ruthless and savage" punishment - implying the death penalty - for leaders of the protests that have erupted since the presidential election on 12 June. Khatami is very close to the re-elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.At a sermon broadcast nationally on Friday at Tehran University, Khatami said, "I want the judiciary to...punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson. "Based on Islamic law, whoever confronts the Islamic state... should be convicted as a 'mohareb' [one who wages war against god]...They should be punished ruthlessly and savagely." Under Iran's Islamic law, punishment for people convicted of being a 'mohareb' is execution. Khatami considers Ahmadinejad the official winner of the disputed presidential election on 12 June. Official election results gave a landslide victory to Ahmadinejad but supporters of the defeated candidates including Mir Hossein Mousavi have disputed the result and taken to the streets of Tehran and other cities in the thousands. It is the most dramatic upheaval seen in the country in more than 30 years since the Islamic revolution in 1979. The two reformist candidates demanded an annulment of the election. But Iran's top legislative body or Guardian Council said on Friday there would be no annulment of the election results because they found no evidence of fraud. "After ten days of examination, we did not see any major irregularities," Abbasali Kadkhodai, a council spokesman, told Iran's official news agency IRNA. Posted by: Fred 2009-06-27 |
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