As Iranians celebrated the first day of the holy month of Ramadan, they were confronted Saturday with new charges of reform movement supporters being tortured in prison and of bodies being secretly buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran.
The accusations, filed on Web sites affiliated with the reform movement, added to the push and pull between an opposition movement struggling to keep itself from being silenced and a government that has tried to move past the crisis over the country’s disputed presidential elections in June.
Iran’s political crisis smolders on at least two levels, political analysts said: in the hostility nursed by the millions of people who feel that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory was fraudulent, and in the behind-the-scenes fighting within the institutions of power among political and clerical insiders.
On Saturday the internal battle appeared to be on display again when Mr. Ahmadinejad broke with tradition and skipped a meeting of the Expediency Council, according to the Web site Parleman News, which is affiliated with a parliamentary faction that has opposed the president. The council, an influential government body, is run by a rival of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s, the former vice president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
