Iran cracks down on reformists after vote sparks riots

“At least 10 members of the Islamic Iran Participation Front and the Islamic Revolution Mujahedeen Organisation were arrested yesterday,” said Rajab Ali Mazroei,a member of the front.

Thousands of Mousavi supporters swept through Tehran on Saturday shouting “Down with the Dictator” after final results showed the hardline incumbent Ahmadinejad winning almost 63 per cent of the vote. Baton-wielding riot police firing tear gas clashed with protestors who pelted security forces with stones and set rubbish bins and police vehicles ablaze in unrest not seen since student riots a decade ago. “The election was completely free… and it is a great victory,” Ahmadinejad,52,said in his television address,calling on his supporters to gather today in a Tehran square where many of the clashes occurred. Mousavi cried foul over what he branded a “rigged” vote and a “charade” and said it could lead to tyranny in the Shiite-dominated nation,which has lived under clerical rule since the Islamic revolution three decades ago.

But he had called on his supporters to stay calm and show restraint after official results showed he had secured less than 34 per cent of the vote despite some expectations he would win enough to go through to a second-round runoff. The election results dashed Western hopes of change after four years under the combative Ahmadinejad,who set the country on a collision course with the West over its nuclear drive and his anti-Israeli tirades. Iran’s all-powerful supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed Ahmadinejad’s victory and urged the country to unite behind him after the most heated election campaign since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

However the vote outcome appears to have galvanised a grass-roots movement for change in the Islamic republic,where 60 percent of the population was born after the revolution. The international community reacted cautiously to the vote outcome and the allegations of vote irregularities. “The United States has refrained from commenting on the election in Iran.