Tehran, Iran — Two key allies of Iran's reformist president were convicted of election irregularities and sentenced to prison, state-run radio reported Sunday, dealing another blow to pro-democracy forces.
The convictions of Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh and Tehran Gov. Ayat Azarmi were seen as a setback for President Mohammad Khatami and reformers fighting an uphill battle against Islamic hard-liners.
Tajzadeh's Interior Ministry was in charge of supervising the legislative elections in February 2000, in which hard-liners lost control of the Majlis, or parliament, for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution. He was later appointed to supervise the June presidential elections in which Khatami is expected to run.
Tajzadeh, one of Khatami's boldest defenders, was convicted of vote-rigging, the official Islamic Republic News Agency said. He was sentenced to a year in jail, dismissed from government services for 39 months and banned from membership in election councils for six years, state radio said. The election councils oversee voting.
The sentence was handed down by Judge Nasser Daqiqi of Tehran's Administrative Court, IRNA said, though it wasn't clear when.
In the same case, Azarmi was sentenced to 18 months in jail, barred from government service for 23 months and from elections councils for five years. Reports did not specify the charges against him.
"I have not accepted the charge of irregularities in the legislative elections. I was determined to defend the elections under any circumstances," IRNA quoted Tajzadeh as saying later Sunday. "Some are angry with the vote of the people. ... People will turn out in great numbers in the June presidential elections and will show which side they support."
The men have 20 days to appeal the verdict, the radio report said.
In the legislative elections, the Tehran governor's office cooperated with the Interior Ministry for polling in the capital, where reform advocates won nearly all of the 30 seats.
Since then, the hard-liners, who are led by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have jailed several of Khatami's important allies and closed down more than 30 publications, most of them pro-democracy newspapers.
The presidential elections in June are widely expected to be another showdown between the two factions. The move against Tajzadeh and Azarmi was seen as a a pre-emptive strike by the hard-liners, who fear another win by the popular Khatami.
The hard-liners control the courts and other key institutions, but not the Interior Ministry, which oversees elections.
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