Iran's dissident Grand Ayatollah Montazeri dies

Iran's top dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a fierce critic of the hardline leadership who denounced June's disputed election as fraudulent, has died at the age of 87.

"Hossein Ali Montazeri passed away in his home last night," the official IRNA news agency said in a report that did not mention his title.

He had been named to succeed late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Iran's supreme leader, but quarreled with him in 1989 over the mass execution of prisoners. Instead, the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, succeeded Khomeini after he died later the same year.

National mourning

Iran's opposition leaders Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi urged their supporters on Sunday to attend Montazeri's funeral on Monday, announcing a day of national mourning, the reformist Jaras website reported.

The reformist Tagheer website said pro-opposition Iranians were gathering in Tehran squares to mourn and that riot police were out in parts of Qom, where Montazeri lived and died.

His death from a heart attack, reported by official media on Sunday, coincides with tension rising once again in the Islamic Republic, six months after the presidential poll plunged the major oil producer into political crisis.

Montazeri, who branded Iran's disputed election in June fraudulent, was an architect of the 1979 Islamic revolution but fell out with the present clerical leadership and spent five years under house arrest until 2002.

He was also a vocal backer of the Iranian opposition which has rejected the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June.

The cleric, who was widely regarded as the most knowledgeable religious scholar in Iran, emerged as the spiritual leader of the opposition, an adversary the state was unable to silence or jail because of his religious credentials and seminal role in the founding of the republic.

While Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has no special religious credentials, Ayatollah Montazeri was a marja, or source of emulation, the highest standing a cleric can hold in Shiite Islam and was one once of the teachers of Ayatollah Khamenei.

In August, Montezeri described the clerical establishment as a "dictatorship", saying the authorities' handling of street unrest following the June presidential poll "could lead to the fall of the regime".

"A political system based on force, oppression, changing people's votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened … for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail is condemned and illegitimate," he said in comments posted on his and opposition websites.

The pro-reform opposition says the poll was rigged to secure hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election.

The authorities have denied the charge and portrayed the huge opposition protests that erupted after the election as a foreign-backed bid to undermine the clerical leadership.

A political system based on force, oppression, changing people's votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened … for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail is condemned and illegitimate

Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri