IRAN'S ruling clerics closed ranks around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday, hailing him a "champion" amid signs he had begun purging his government of anyone seen as an opposition sympathiser.
Resignation mixed with indignation settled over supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Iran's embattled opposition leader, whose insistence that fraud robbed him of victory in the 12 June election touched off two weeks of street clashes.
Iran's highes
t electoral authority proclaimed the election outcome valid on Monday – paving the way for Mr Ahmadinejad to be sworn in next month.
Three oil ministry officials with loose ties to Mr Mousavi were fired, the independent news agency Fararu reported. All three were prominent members of former president Mohammad Khatami's government and reportedly were allies of another former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Both former presidents were considered to be backers of Mr Mousavi's presidential bid.
Mr Ahmadinejad basked in the praise of ranking clerics and supporters who celebrated his re-election in a landslide questioned by western analysts who have called his roughly 2-to-1 margin of victory suspicious.
The semiofficial news agency FarsNews quoted Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri as saying in a message of congratulations that Mr Ahmadinejad had been "a champion, always on the scene". Another top cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, called the election the cleanest in the history of the Islamic Republic.
In validating the result, the 12-member Guardian Council said it found only "slight irregularities" after randomly selecting and recounting 10 per cent of the nearly 40 million ballots cast.
The full article contains 261 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
