Iran council looking into poll results complaints

Tehran: Iran's top legislative body, seeking to calm days of public fury over a disputed presidential election, has invited the three losers to discuss their complaints tomorrow, its spokesman said on Thursday.

The election has provoked Iran's worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Bloodshed, protests, arrests and a media crackdown have rocked the world's fifth biggest oil exporter, embroiled in a dispute with the West over its nuclear programme.

A spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council said it had begun "careful examination" of 646 complaints submitted after the June 12 vote.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared winner with nearly 63 per cent of the vote against 34 per cent for his closest rival, Mir Hussain Mousavi.

Mousavi wants the vote annulled and held again. The council has said it is ready only to recount disputed ballot boxes.

Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodai said Mousavi and fellow-candidates Mehdi Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai could raise their problems at the extraordinary council meeting.

Mousavi's supporters prepared to heed his call for a day of mourning yesterday for those killed in mass demonstrations against what the former prime minister says was a rigged poll.

Iran's English-language state television has reported eight people killed in five days of protests in Tehran and elsewhere.

Security agents have detained opposition politician Ebrahim Yazdi while he was in hospital, an ally of his said on Thursday.

Yazdi, who heads the banned Freedom Movement and was foreign minister in Iran's first government after the revolution, was among scores of reformists rounded up since the election.

On his website, Mousavi called on Iranians to demonstrate peacefully or gather in mosques wearing the colour of mourning - black as opposed to the green of his election campaign.

He urged them to show solidarity with the families of those wounded or martyred "as a consequence of illegal and violent encounters" with people protesting against the election result.

Ahmadinejad defended the legitimacy of the vote, telling a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that it had "posed a great challenge to the West's democracy," Mehr news agency said.

"The ideals of the Islamic Revolution were the winners of the election," Ahmadinejad said, adding that 25 million of 42 million voters had approved the way he was running the country.

The authorities reject charges that they rigged the vote, but scores of thousands of Iranians have braved riot police and religious militia to show their anger on the streets, ignoring Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's call for national unity.

"The friendly atmosphere that existed prior to the election should not turn into an atmosphere of confrontation and enmity afterwards, since both groups of voters believe in the Islamic system," Khamenei said. The protests represent a challenge to the authority of Khamenei, who has usually stood above the factional fray.

A senior Western diplomat in Tehran, who argued that Khamenei's call for unity had clearly failed to settle the showdown with the opposition, said: "Now the lines are drawn. He must give more to the opposition otherwise this will continue."