Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist's defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and charged that the result was the work of a dictatorship.
Mousavi's arrest was reported by an unofficial source, according to whom the presidential hopeful was arrested en route to the home of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Nevertheless, there were a number of contradictory reports from Iran on Saturday, in 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.
By nightfall, cell phone service appeared to have been cut in the capital Tehran. And Ahmadinejad, in a nationally televised victory speech, accused the foreign media of coverage that harms the Iranian people. There was more rioting at night and fires continued to burn on the streets of Tehran. |