Report: Defeated Ahmadinejad rival arrested in Iran - Rafsanjani resigns in protest

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Report: Defeated Ahmadinejad rival arrested in Iran

By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies

Tags: Israel News

Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was arrested Saturday shortly after he was defeated at the polls by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an unofficial source reported.

According to the source, the presidential hopeful was arrested en route to the home of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that were a number of contradictory reports from Iran on Saturday, in a large part due to the heavy restrictions imposed on the media in the Islamic Republic, in particular on foreign reporters.

It was also reported Saturday that former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani resigned from all of his official positions in protest against the results of the election, which Mousavi denounced as rigged.

Supporters of Mousavi, the main election challenger to Ahmadinejad, earlier clashed with police Saturday as authorities declared that the hard-line Iranian president was re-elected in a landslide. Opponents responded with the most serious unrest in the capital in a decade and charges that the result was the work of a dictatorship.

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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092304.html