Tehran, July 1: Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called off a trip to Libya for an African Union summit on Wednesday that would have given the hardline President another chance to appear at an international forum after his disputed re-election.
A spokesman at Mr Ahmadinejad’s office said the visit had been cancelled. He gave no reason. It would have been the President’s second foray abroad since the June 12 poll set off Iran’s most dramatic internal unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
In a show of confidence, Mr Ahmadinejad had attended a regional summit in Russia four days after the vote, ignoring huge street protests by supporters of losing candidates Mirho-ssein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, who both say the election was rigged. The Guardian Council, a supervisory body, on Monday endorsed the election result and dismissed complaints of irregularities, saying a partial recount had shown these were baseless.
But Mr Karoubi, a reformist cleric who came fourth in the poll, remained defiant, saying in a statement posted on his party’s website that he viewed Mr Ahmadinejad’s government as illegitimate. Both Mr Karoubi and Mr Mousavi have called for the election to be annulled and held again. Iran also halted the publication of Mr Karoubi reformist party’s newspaper after he refused to recognise Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, its website said. Iran has accused foreign powers, notably Britain and the United States, of fomenting the post-election demonstrations. The semi-official Fars news agency said one of three local staff of the British embassy still detained in Tehran had helped organise the protests,
Meanwhile, Iran said on Wednesday that 20 people were killed and more than 1,000 arrested in the wave of protests over the disputed presidential poll as the authorities kept up the pressure on the Opposition. "No policeman was killed in the Tehran riots but 20 rioters were killed," Iran’s police chief Ahmadi Moghaddam said. "The police arrested 1,032 people in the recent riots," he said.
—Reuters,AFP
