Iran reformist backs down as 100 face riot trial

A top Iranian reformist who went on trial in a Tehran court with about 100 others on charges of rioting backed down yesterday from claims of massive vote rigging in the June presidential vote.

Mohammad Ali Abtahi, giving testimony in a revolutionary court, said there had been no fraud in the June 12 poll which returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office for another four years, the Fars news agency reported.

The backdown by Abtahi, a close aide of reformist ex-president Mohammad Khatami, deals a blow to the opposition movement which claims that Ahmadinejad's re-election was fraudulent.

"I say to all my friends and all friends who hear us, that the issue of fraud in Iran was a lie and was brought up to create riots so Iran becomes like Afghanistan and Iraq and suffers damage and hardship... and if this happened, there would be no name and trace of the revolution left," Abtahi told the court, according to Fars.

He said reformists and opposition leaders had betrayed Iran's all-powerful supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"The 10th (presidential) election was different and it took two or three years to work on it. I think reformists took action to sort of restrict the (supreme) leader," he said.

The re-election of Ahmadinejad has triggered the worst crisis in the 30-year history of the Islamic republic.

Around 30 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the post-poll violence when hundreds of thousands of anti-Ahmadinejad protesters took to streets to denounce his victory.

Up to 2,000 protesters, political activists, reformists and journalists were arrested as they publicly challenged the election results. Most were later released, but around 250 remain behind bars.

Among the 100 or so reformists and opposition members who went on trial yesterday are Mohsen Aminzadeh and Mohsen Safai-Farahani, deputy ministers under the government of Khatami, and Mohsen Mirdamadi, head of the Islamic Iran Participation Front.

Iranian media said the defendants are accused of having "participated in riots, acting against national security, disturbing public order, vandalising public and government property, having ties with counter-revolutionary groups and of planning to launch a velvet revolution."

Fars said the accused, if proven guilty, could face a maximum jail term of five years, unless they are charged with being a 'mohareb' or enemy of God, which can carry the death penalty.

Abtahi said that he "agreed" with the prosecution charges.

"It was wrong of me to take part in the rallies, but (Mehdi) Karroubi told me that we cannot call the people onto the streets with such a meagre number of votes, so we had better go to the streets ourselves to demonstrate our protest," he said.

Karroubi, a reformist ex-parliament speaker, won just 333,635 votes or 0.85 per cent in the presidential ballot. Abtahi was one of his advisers during the election.

Karroubi and opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi are spearheading the massive anti-Ahmadinejad campaign and are accused of launching a "velvet" or soft, revolution to topple the Islamic regime.

"I want to say something, about the velvet revolution part," Abtahi said. "I think the capacity for such a thing to happen exists in the country, but I don't know if there was a real intention to do it."

Another accused, Mohammad Atrianfar, also expressed his loyalty to the regime during his testimony.

The official IRNA news agency quoted Atrianfar, of the reformist Executives of Construction group, as saying he was part of the regime, adding, "We all must submit to the absolute leadership of jurisprudence and strengthen it."

He also said that "we mistook certain irregularities (in the vote) as fraud," Fars quoted him as saying.

American-Iranian scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, also among the defendants, said the United States had long had a plan to "change the regime" in Iran.

"To find the main instigators of the riots, one should search the government, semi-government and intelligence services of the United States," he was quoted as saying by IRNA.

Tajbakhsh was also detained in 2007 in Iran for threatening national security but was later released on bail.