Iran election board repeats annulment call for Tehran
moderates
TEHRAN, April 8 (AFP) - Iran's conservative electoral supervisory committee
reiterated its intention to overturn the election of five leading reformists
to the Tehran municipal council, newspapers said Thursday.
Committee head and hardline MP Ali Movahedi Savoji has sent a letter
to the Tehran governorship stating that the election of the five should
be invalidated because their candidacies were illegal, the press reported.
Savoji said last month that the committee would not officially approve
the results of the February polls until April 20 and that the five had
failed to meet the electoral criteria.
"The five failed to turn in their resignations from their posts
before the elections," he said, adding that "any person with
any number of votes can be eliminated if he is found to have been unqualified."
Among those in question is former interior minister Abdollah Nuri,
the leading vote-getter in Tehran and a key supporter of reformist President
Mohammad Khatami.
Pro-Khatami candidates won all 15 seats on the Tehran municipal council
in the February elections and made major gains nationwide following a bitterly
fought campaign against conservatives marked by several violent incidents.
The municipal elections were the first in Iran since the 1979 Islamic
revolution and were seen as a key component of Khatami's reform agenda.
The Islamic regime's conservatives have taken several strong steps
to roll back the reformists' wins, including the banning on Wednesday of
a leading moderate newsaper headed by MP Faezeh Hashemi.
Conservative MPs in recent weeks have also called for the impeachment
of Interior Minister Abdol-Vahed Mussavi-Lari over his ministry's handling
of the elections.
The February vote was seen as a key indicator of the relative popularity
of both camps ahead of next year's parliamentary elections, in which reformers
hope to wrest control of the conservative-dominated parliament.
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