Iran's Supreme Leader Orders Election Fraud Probe

MSNBC----

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's state television said Monday that the supreme leader ordered an investigation into claims of fraud in last week's presidential election.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the powerful Guardian Council to examine the allegations by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has claimed widespread vote rigging in Friday's election. The government declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner in a landslide victory.

It was a stunning turnaround for Iran's most powerful figure, who previously welcomed the results.

The outcome of the election has disconcerted Western powers trying to induce the world's fifth-biggest oil exporter to curb its nuclear program. President Barack Obama had urged Iran's leadership "to unclench its fist" for a new start in ties.

Mousavi wrote an appeal Sunday to the Guardian Council, a powerful 12-member body that is a pillar of Iran's theocracy. Mousavi also met Sunday with Khamenei.

Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday that Obama's effort to engage Tehran after a nearly three-decade estrangement would continue, regardless of the election's result. Obama, shifting course from his predecessor, has said he wants to talk to the theocratic regime in Tehran, with the central goal of stopping it from producing a nuclear weapon. He has set a year-end deadline for a positive response to his overture.

Biden told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the administration was still examining whether Friday's vote in Iran accurately reflected a response to Obama's desire for engagement.

"That's the question," Biden said. "Is this the result of the Iranian people's wishes? The hope is that the Iranian people, all their votes have been counted, they've been counted fairly. But look, we just don't know enough."

He said the United States had no choice right now but to accept the outcome as announced, but, Biden said, "I have doubts" about its fairness.

Mousavi's backers have waged three days of street protests in Tehran.

Protest rally postponed in Tehran
The defeated candidate's supporters called off a planned protest rally in Tehran on Monday after the Interior Ministry declared it would be illegal and treated as sedition.

A Mousavi Web site said the gathering had been delayed after the Interior Ministry refused to authorize it.

The European Union urged Iran not to use violence against those protesting against the disputed election and urged the authorities to look into complaints of irregularities.

"I have thorough respect for all the Iranian citizens who have shown their discontent and have demonstrated peacefully," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner told reporters in Luxembourg. "I do hope that the security forces will refrain from showing violence."

The Guardian Council, whose chairman, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, endorsed Ahmadinejad before the vote, said it would rule within 10 days on two official complaints it had received from Mousavi and another losing candidate, Mohsen Rezaie.

"Mousavi and Rezaie appealed yesterday. After the official announcement (of the appeal) the Guardian Council has seven to 10 days to see if it was a healthy election or not," ISNA news agency quoted council spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodai as saying.

Guardian council's role
The council vets election candidates and must formally approve results for the outcome to stand. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier told Iranians to support Ahmadinejad.

On Sunday, Mousavi's supporters handed out leaflets calling for a rally in downtown Tehran on Monday afternoon. The protests over the last two days are the sharpest show of discontent against the Islamic Republic's leadership for years.

"The Interior Ministry issued a statement and said no permission had been issued for a rally ... The holding of such a gathering would be illegal," state radio said.

"Some seditious elements had planned to hold a rally and by fabrication said they had permission from the Interior Ministry. Any disrupter of public security would be dealt with according to the law," it said.

Mousavi urged Iranians on Sunday to keep up nationwide protests "in a peaceful and legal way."

Last week a senior Revolutionary Guard official vowed to foil what he called an attempt by Mousavi and his supporters in the streets to stage a "velvet revolution" —the name given to Czechoslovakia's non-violent 1989 revolution against communism.

Protests, clashes
Pro-Mousavi demonstrators threw stones at police at Tehran University on Sunday and clashed with Ahmadinejad supporters on a main avenue that was littered with broken glass and fires.

In the north of the capital, a stronghold of Mousavi backers, riot police patrolled after midnight. Garbage burned in the street, some cars had their windows broken, and police blocked access to roads.

After dusk, some Mousavi supporters took to rooftops across Tehran calling out "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest), an echo of tactics by protesters in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

U.S. leaders have shown caution in their comments on the election so far, in the hope of keeping alive Obama's strategy of engagement with Iran, with tougher talk coming from Europe.

Germany, one of Iran's biggest trading partners and a negotiator in the West's nuclear talks with Tehran, said it had summoned the Iranian ambassador on Sunday.

"We are looking toward Tehran with great concern at the moment. There are a lot of reports about electoral fraud," Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told German ZDF TV.


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Sources: MSNBC, Newsweek, Google Maps