Tehran, June 24: A losing candidate in Iran’s disputed presidential election formally withdrew complaints of vote rigging Wednesday, state television reported, opening a rift among those who had challenged the outcome even as other opponents called for continued protests.
Iran Mohsen Rezai, a former hardline commander of the Revolutionary Guards, had complained that he had evidence of 900,000 votes cast for him, while the official count was 680,000, less than two percent of the turnout in the official tally of 40 million.
Mr. Rezai’s move deepened the impression that the government’s crackdown on the opposition has left it in some disarray.
Despite efforts to silence dissent, however, the wife of the main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi, issued a call Wednesday for the immediate release of Iranians detained in election protests, his Web site reported.
“I regret the arrest of many politicians and people and want their immediate release,” Zahra Rahnavard, who has been playing an influential role in the protests, declared, according to Reuters. “It is my duty to continue legal protests to preserve Iranian rights.”
Trailing Mr. Moussavi and the former Parliament speaker, Mehdi Karoubi, Mr. Rezai was the most conservative of the losing candidates and had been under strong pressure from Iran’s rulers to pull back from the confrontation.
In a letter to the Guardian Council, the leading electoral oversight body, Mr. Rezai said the current “political, social and security situation has entered a sensitive and decisive phase, which is more important than the election,” The letter was sent to the secretary of the Guardian Council, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the broadcaster said on its Web site
Mr. Rezai was quoted as calling the ballot a “clear sample of religious democracy,” sharing language with a powerful defense of the ballot last Friday by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader.
On Wednesday, Ayatollah Khamenei agreed to a request by the Guardian Council — an influential 12-member body of clerics — for five more days to investigate over 600 complaints it says opponents of Mr. Ahmadinejad have lodged.
The move appeared largely symbolic since the Guardian Council has already announced it will certify the results. For its part, the government has taken the provocative step of announcing its intention to have Mr. Ahmadinejad sworn in as president by early August, despite the most sustained challenge to the government since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
According to Press TV, Mr. Rezai said he was withdrawing because of a shortage of time to investigate irregularities.
While his share of the opposition vote was small — particularly in comparison to the 34 percent the official count gave to Mr. Moussavi and the 63 percent claimed by Mr. Ahmadinejad — his decision represented a further move toward a formal victory declaration for the president.
Iran’s government has been moving aggressively on to crush popular protests , setting up a special court for demonstrators, detaining hundreds of independent and opposition journalists and activists, and sending a force of police officers and militiamen onto the streets.
The crackdown left the center of Tehran eerily quiet on Tuesday after the huge demonstrations and clashes of recent days. It seemed perhaps a moment of pause for protesters to regroup or reconsider, after at least 17 demonstrators had been killed. Arrests and intimidation left the opposition with no visible leadership, even amid mostly anonymous calls on the Internet for more demonstrations and even a general strike in coming days.
Late Tuesday, though, reports circulating among the government’s opponents said there had been scattered clashes of uncertain magnitude and duration between protesters and the security forces.
On Wednesday, people on some of Tehran’s streets circulated a five-page flier calling on opponents of the election to demonstrate at 4 p.m. local time outside the Parliament building in the capital with their families and to gather on Thursday at the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic revolution.
Opponents have already declared Thursday a day of mourning for the dead, including Neda Agha-Soltan a 26-year-old woman whose death on the streets and depicted in amateur video clips has become an emblem of protest.
The origin of the flier was not clear and it was not known how widely it was being distributed. The flier was issued jointly in the names of Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karoubi and it said Mr. Moussavi would make a public appearance.
The last confirmed public appearance of Mr. Moussavi, the reformist candidate who briefly tried to unite and lead the challengers, was on Thursday, and he last issued a statement on Sunday. His Web site was not functioning well on Tuesday, and his newspaper had been raided by the police and its staff of about 25 arrested.
“So far we have not had a proper leadership,” said an active member of the opposition, who refused to be identified for fear of arrest. “People had become emotional because of what happened. They were mobilized because of that.”
There were, however, growing signs of divisions, too, within the alliance united behind Mr. Ahmadinejad. Members of Parliament upset with the brutality of the government crackdown summoned the interior, justice and intelligence ministers to a hearing.
–Agencies