Tehran, December 20: Top Iranian dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a fierce critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was once tapped to become Iran’s undisputed number one, is dead, his office said Sunday.
Montazeri, 87, died of an illness Saturday night, said his office in the holy city of Qom, where he had been based for years.
“He was diabetic and had been using insulin for years… he had also some lung problems and asthma. In fact he was suffering from several diseases,” his doctor told state television.
Montazeri’s funeral will be held on Monday and he will be buried in the shrine of Masoumeh, a revered Shiite figure, in Qom, his office said.
Foreign media are banned from covering the ceremony.
“Thousands of people from Isfahan, Najafabad, Shiraz and other cities have left for Qom to take part in his funeral,” Parlemannews.ir, the website of parliament’s reformist faction, reported.
The grand ayatollah was an inspiration to rights advocates and pro-reform groups and was considered by his followers as the highest living authority of Shiite Islam in Iran.
Montazeri’s son, Ahmad, offered “condolences to … all people who seek freedom and justice, to those who fight in the path of God all over the world… and especially to his students,” ILNA news agency reported.
According to the opposition website Rahesabz.net, students in the Tehran University immediately began mourning once they heard news of the death of the grand ayatollah, a source of inspiration for many Iranians.
Montazeri, once designated as the successor to the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, came out in bold support of the Iranian opposition — which comprises many students — when it rejected the re-election of Ahmadinejad in June.
The cleric had long been critical of the concentration of power in the hands of the supreme leader and called for changes to the constitution which he helped draw up after the Islamic revolution, to limit the leader’s authority.
Montazeri had often criticised hardliner Ahmadinejad over his domestic and foreign policies, including Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the West.
He had also called on other leading clerics to break their silence over incidents and rights abuses during the government’s crackdown on opposition supporters protesting the June presidential election, which they claim was massively rigged in Ahmadinejad’s favour.
Controversially, he had called for direct talks between Tehran and Washington to avert conflict over Iran’s controversial programme of uranium enrichment.
The grand ayatollah described the 1979 seizure of US embassy in Tehran a “mistake” even though he said he had approved of the move at the time.
Montazeri, one of the main architects of the Islamic republic, was a student and close ally of Khomeini, whom he was set to succeed.
But the cleric fell from grace in the late 1980s after he became too openly critical of political and cultural restrictions, most notably Iran’s treatment of political prisoners and opposition groups.
Montazeri resigned months before Khomeini’s death in 1989, and was told by Khomeini to stay out of politics and focus instead on teaching in the city of Qom.
Unfazed by such warnings, he continued to speak out.
The grand ayatollah also questioned the theological credentials of current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
This was branded as treason, and in 1997 he was placed under house arrest.
Freed after five years on health grounds during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, the grand ayatollah vowed that he would continue to speak out in defence of freedom and justice.
In his latest reaction to the post-vote crackdown on protests, Montazeri strongly slammed “the killing of innocent people, the arrest of political activists and freedom-seekers as well as their illegal show trials.”
Iran’s state news agency IRNA branded him as the “clerical figure of rioters” — the term used by pro-government media for post-vote protesters — and dropped his clerical title of ayatollah in its early reports.
—Agencies