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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Iran's sacked minister named top prosecutor |
| 2009-08-25 |
| [Al Arabiya Latest] Iran's judiciary on Monday named as the Islamic Republic's top prosecutor the cleric who was sacked as intelligence minister by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the manager of a Tehran cemetery denied carrying out secret burials for vote protesters. Ahmadinejad fired Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei last month, a move Iranian media linked to disagreement over the conservative president's choice of a new first vice president. Ahmadinejad was re-elected for a second four-year term in a disputed June presidential election, which plunged Iran into its deepest internal crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution and exposed deep divisions within its ruling elite. Some of Ahmadinejad's conservative backers have abandoned him since the vote, even though he enjoys the backing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest authority. Pro-reform opposition leaders say the presidential vote was rigged and see Ahmadinejad's next government as illegitimate. The authorities reject such charges. The official IRNA news agency said Mohseni-Ejei was picked as new general prosecutor in a meeting between new judiciary chief Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani and Supreme Court judges. He replaces Qorban-Ali Dori-Najafabadi. State television said Larijani had confirmed Mohseni-Ejei's appointment. Secret burials denied Meanwhile, the manager of a Tehran cemetery denied it carried out secret burials of people who died in post-election unrest, as alleged by some reformist media, the Mehr news agency said on Monday. Pro-reform opposition website Norooznews reported on Saturday that more than 40 people were buried on July 12 and 15 in unidentified graves in block 302 of the Behesht Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran. But Mahmoud Rezaiyan, managing director of the Behesht Zahra Organization, said that these reports were only "rumors." "In recent days we have not received any unidentified body and we were not forced to issue burial permits either," Rezaiyan said. "The report that there are mass graves is not true." According to Norooznews, the graves were only marked by the burial permit numbers. It also added that bodies, which were frozen, were brought to the cemetery from an "industrial cold storage" in southwestern Tehran. It said the secret burials were hurriedly done to avoid spreading of reports that bodies of dead protesters were being held in a cold storage after a frozen corpse was delivered to a family. Officially about 30 people were killed in the violence that erupted after the disputed re-election of Ahmadinejad. Opposition groups claim that 69 people died in the crackdown on protesters. |
| Posted by:Fred |