Mousavi plans to launch reformist political party

Beirut: The top figure of Iran's nascent political reform movement, opposition presidential candidate Mir Hussain Mousavi, will launch a political party to pursue his goals, a reformist newspaper reported on Sunday.

Iranian officials, meanwhile, released a jailed European journalist while the lawyer of an imprisoned employee of the British embassy in Tehran, said that he was confident that his client's case would soon be resolved.

Embattled President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated calls for a live "debate" with US President Barack Obama late on Saturday in a possible sign Iran was seeking to ease diplomatic strains created over his recent disputed re-election victory and its violent aftermath.

Iran continues a wide-ranging crackdown on opposition figures and reformists following the June election, on Sunday blocking the website of a small reformist clerical bloc in Qom, a Shiite holy city. The group sharply criticised the recent vote and subsquent recount effort by the Guardian Council, whose members are appointed directly and indirectly by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who supports Ahmadinejad.

"A council, whose jurist and jurisprudent members had disproved their impartiality months ahead of the election, is not competent to rule on the cleanness and accuracy of the vote," the proclamation by the Qom Assembly of Instructors and Researchers said. The group, somewhat prominent during the heyday of former President Mohammad Khatami, is now far less influential than the similarly named but far more important Qom Association of Seminary School Instructors, which is pro-Khamenei and controls more than 80 per cent of the holy city's 50 or so seminaries.

The spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry on Sunday announced the release of freelance journalist Iason Athanasiadis, a citizen of Britain and Greece, who was arrested as he tried to leave the country through Tehran's international airport several weeks ago, state television reported.

The lawyer for British Embassy employee Hussain Rassam refuted reports that his client had been formally charged, saying he was optimistic the Iranian national would be released in the coming days.