Tehran, December 23: Iran police clashed with mourners at a memorial service in Isfahan Wednesday for dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, arresting more than 50, reports said.
Hundreds of police and security force members early morning surrounded the Seyed mosque in Isfahan where the service was to be held and prevented mourners from entering, sparking fierce clashes, opposition websites said.
The mourners were shouting slogans in support of Iran’s opposition Green Movement and police fired tear gas to disperse them, a website said.
Another website, of Iran’s reformist minority faction in parliament, said that “over 50 people, including four reporters, were arrested in clashes.”
The latest crackdown on the opposition comes a day after its major leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was sacked from his post as president of the Academy of Art, which the architect and painter had headed for 10 years.
Montazeri, a vocal backer of the opposition, died aged 87 on Saturday.
His funeral in the holy city of Qom on Monday saw hundreds of thousands of mourners pour onto the streets, effectively turning the ceremony into a massive anti-government protest which ended in clashes between police and mourners.
Wednesday’s memorial service in Isfahan, where Montazeri had many followers, was to be led by prominent reformist cleric Ayatollah Jalaledin Taheri.
Montazeri came out in bold support of the opposition when it rejected the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June and issued blistering statements condemning violence against demonstrators and branding the government “illegitimate.”
Once tipped to succeed the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, he had long been critical of the concentration of power in the hands of the supreme leader and called for changes to the constitution to limit his authority.
Since his death, another prominent opposition supporter, Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Sanei, has faced pressure from hardliners, according to a reformist website.
“The Green Movement with Mousavi and (opposition leader Mehdi) Karroubi and Sanei’s direct support … explicitly insulted” Khamenei, the seminarians said in a statement.
Fars news agency reported on Tuesday that Mousavi had been sacked from his position as president of the Academy of Art.
Mousavi, a former prime minister, had headed the Academy of Art since its establishment in 1999.
He still holds posts on a top cultural body and an arbitration body, whose members are appointed by the supreme leader.
Mousavi ran for president in June 12 elections which he lost to Ahmadinejad.
—Agencies