TEHRAN — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad branded Sunday’s anti-government protests as a "nauseating play" staged by the United States and Israel, state news agency IRNA reported.
"Iranians have seen lots of these games. Americans and Zionists are the sole audience of a play they have commissioned and sold out," he said on Tuesday in reaction to the protests, in which eight people were killed.
"A nauseating play is performed," he said.
TEHERAN — INFLUENTIAL Iranian cleric Ayatollah Abbas Vaez Tabasi on Tuesday branded opposition leaders as ‘enemies of God’ whose punishment under Islamic sharia law is death, Fars news agency reported. ‘Leaders of sedition are Mohareb [the enemies of God],’ Ayatollah Vaez Tabasi, the representative of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Khorasan province, was quoted as saying by Fars.
‘In our judiciary, the verdict for Mohareb is clear and they deal with it within law,’ he said. His statement is the strongest threat yet to have been issued against opposition leaders who have rejected the June re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as fraudulent. – AFP
The number of protesters and revolutionaries killed during the Iranian Revolution range between 3,000 to 60,000. Ayatollah Khomeini stated that "60,000 men, women and children were martyred by the Shah’s regime," but estimates compiled by a researcher (Emad al-Din Baghi) at the Martyrs Foundation (Bonyad Shahid) come to only 2,781 killed in the 1978 and 1979 clashes between demonstrators and the Shah’s army and security forces, which if true mean that Iran suffered remarkably few casualties compared to contemporary events such as the South African anti-apartheid movement.
After the revolution human rights groups estimated the number of casualties suffered by protesters and prisoners of the new Islamic regime to be several thousand. The first to be executed were Members of the old regime – senior generals, followed by over 200 of the Shah’s senior civilian officials – as punishment and to eliminate the danger of coup d’État. Brief trials lacking defense attorneys, juries, transparency or opportunity for the accused to defend themselves were held by revolutionary judges such as Sadegh Khalkhali, the Sharia judge. By January 1980 "at least 582 persons had been executed." Among those executed was Amir Abbas Hoveida, former Prime Minister of Iran. Between January 1980 and June 1981, when Bani-Sadr was impeached, at least 900 executions took place, for everything from drug and sexual offenses to `corruption on earth,` from plotting counter-revolution and spying for Israel to membership in opposition groups. In the 12 months following that Amnesty International documented 2,946 executions, with several thousand more killed in the next two years according to the anti-regime guerillas People’s Mujahedin of Iran.
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