Iranian opposition puts election unrest toll at 69

Published 10:34 pm Tuesday, August 10, 2010

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s opposition said today at least 69 people have died in two months of postelection unrest based on accounts from the victims’ families, more than double the official toll released by parliament.

A top aide to Mir Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who claims he was the true winner of the June 12 presidential vote, handed the list over to parliament.

“We submitted names of 69 killed and some 220 detainees to the special committee of parliament during a meeting in parliament on Monday,” Ali Reza Beheshti told The Associated Press. He said it included names verified after double-checking with the families, adding the number is still rising. The toll includes deaths in the capital, Tehran, as well other parts of the country, he said.

Beheshti declined to release the list publicly out of concern it could inflame the situation.

Iran’s deputy police chief, Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, said police are standing by a toll of 19 given by the Tehran provincial governor in June, even though a parliamentary committee that investigated deaths in unrest more recently put the figure at 30. Radan also lashed out at foreign media, as Iranian authorities have done often during the crisis, saying they were trying to weaken the will of the armed forces.

The higher toll could fan outrage among pro-reform opposition supporters as well as some conservatives over the treatment of protesters, particularly alleged abuses of those who have been detained.

Mahdi Karroubi — another pro-reform candidate defeated in the election — said over the weekend that he has received reports from former military commanders and other senior officials that some detained protesters, both men and women, were raped in custody.

That followed acknowledgments by senior police and judiciary officials that some detainees had been abused in prison, an admission that apparently was aimed at cooling the public anger.

The new list was presented to parliament on the behalf of Mousavi and Karroubi. Human rights groups have said they suspect the death toll is far higher than the official Iranian count.

Hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters took to the streets after the election, claiming it was rigged in favor of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That prompted a violent crackdown led by the powerful Revolutionary Guard and its allied Basij militia.

It has been virtually impossible for journalists to independently verify casualty figures or detentions because the government has tightly restricted coverage of the opposition movement and all its activities.

For example, Iranian authorities have pressured the families of slain protesters not to mourn publicly out of fear the gatherings could spark demonstrations, according to the opposition.

Also today, the spokesman of Iran’s judiciary, Ali Reza Jamshidi, told reporters that while some 4,000 people were initially detained, only 300 remain in custody.

Iran is prosecuting about 100 of the detainees, in what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and others have called a “show trial.” A number of defendants have made public confessions that the opposition says were coerced.

Iran today released an employee of the French Embassy who is among those on trial. Nazak Afshar, a French-Iranian cultural analyst at the embassy, is accused of involvement in postelection disturbances. France wants the charges against her dropped.

France is also pressing for the release of French academic Clotilde Reiss, who is charged with acting against national security by attending protests, gathering information, and taking photos and sending them abroad.

Iran’s ambassador to France said today that Tehran was offering to release Reiss from jail for the rest of the trial as long as she remains in the custody of the French Embassy.

The ambassador, Seyeb Mehdi Miraboutalebi, said on French radio RFI that there had been no response to the offer. The French Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.

Reiss was arrested on July 1 at Tehran’s airport as she was about to leave Iran after five months of studying and teaching French at Isfahan University.

Iran is also under pressure over its detention of three Americans for nearly two weeks after they crossed a poorly marked border while hiking in the Iraq’s Kurdish north.

Today, Iraq distanced itself from any notion it was acting on behalf of the U.S. when its foreign minister prodded Tehran for information last week on the three Americans.

“

We are not mediators,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh.

He said Iraq was interested in learning more about the circumstances that led to the arrests because it involved its border.

The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, raised the issue with his Iranian counterpart last week, setting off speculation that Iraq might be acting on behalf of Washington to help secure the release of the Americans.