Tehran, December 21: Iran police clashed with stone-throwing protesters after the funeral attended by vast crowds of mourners in the holy city of Qom on Monday of dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, websites said.
Montazeri, an inspiration to reformists and human rights activists and a fierce critic of the clerical regime he helped create, died aged 87 on Saturday.
Opposition websites said hundreds of thousands of mourners poured onto the streets of Qom, many chanting slogans and displaying the green of Iran’s opposition — effectively turning the funeral procession into a massive anti-government rally.
Mourners were shouting slogans such as “Dictator, Montazeri’s way will continue” and “Montazeri is not dead, it is the government which is dead,” opposition website Rahesabz.net said.
A report on the parliament’s reformist minority faction website Parlemannews.ir said that “shots were heard fired into the air at the shrine of Masoumeh” where Montazeri was buried.
The report was titled “margins of the funeral” and did not offer any details on when the incident had happened.
Another website, Kaleme.org, said police and security forces clashed with a groups of chanting mourners who after the funeral had gathered in front of Montazeri’s house.
“The police cracked down on people who were shouting (anti-government) slogans in front his house and people threw stones at them,” the website said.
Hundreds of hardline basij militia members and clerics, it added, also gathered near Montazeri’s house and chanted slogans in favour of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and against the protesters.
Rahesabz.net said a group of “basijis attacked Montazeri’s house and tore up his funeral banners.”
There were no immediate reports of injuries or arrests.
Opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi attended the funeral ceremony, which was marred by brief clashes between hardline pro-government vigilantes and mourners, reports said.
The reports could not be independently verified as foreign media are banned from covering the ceremony.
Crowd estimates could also not be verified, with a conservative news site Asriran.com also reporting “hundreds of thousands” of mourners at the ceremony.
The cleric, who had been considered by his followers as the highest living authority of Shiite Islam in Iran, was buried in the shrine of Masoumeh, a revered Shiite figure.
Iran’s Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi described him as the “father of human rights” and herself “one of the millions of his followers and students” in a statement on Rahesabz.
“I learned from you that the silence of the oppressed is aiding the oppressor and that I should not remain quiet,” the lawyer and rights activist said.
A White House spokesman also expressed condolences on the passing of the cleric, even though Iran and the United States have had no diplomatic ties for three decades.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and those who seek to exercise the universal rights and freedoms that he so consistently advocated,” Mike Hammer said in a statement late on Sunday.
Mousavi and Karroubi had declared Monday a day of mourning and urged their supporters to participate in the funeral.
The authorities slowed Internet connections down to a crawl, as has been the case whenever opposition demonstrations are anticipated.
Once designated as the successor to the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Montazeri came out in bold support of the Iranian opposition when it rejected the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June.
Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei offered condolences to his family although Montazeri was also critical of him and questioned his credentials for being the country’s highest religious authority.
Montazeri 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 1979 Islamic revolution, to limit his authority.
Montazeri, one of the chief 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.
—Agencies