TEHRAN: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated on Saturday claims that Barack Obama is interfering in his country, after the US president again criticised the political crackdown in Iran, AFP reported.

‘He (Obama) spoke of reforms and changes, why did he interfere and comment in a way that disregards convention and courtesy,’ Ahmadinejad was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as asking.

On Friday, Obama said Iran’s ‘outrageous’ crackdown on demonstrators would hit his hopes for direct talks with Iran.

‘There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks,’ Obama said, referring to deadly clashes between security forces and demonstrators protesting what they claim was Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent re-election.

However, Obama said talks under the auspices of the five permanent US Security Council members and Germany over Iran’s nuclear programme would likely continue.

‘My expectation would be that you’re going to continue to see some multilateral discussions with Iran,’ he said.

Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany have authorised European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana to discuss the issue with Tehran.

The United States and other Western countries suspect Iran of using its nuclear energy programme as a cover for seeking to developing atomic weapons.

Tehran roundly denies that, saying the programme is purely for civilian use.

Obama also replied to Ahmadinejad’s demands for an apology and accusations that the US president, despite a measured early response to the crackdown, had meddled in Iran’s internal affairs.

‘I don’t take Mr Ahmadinejad’s statements seriously about apologies, particularly given the fact that the United States has gone out of its way not to interfere with the election process in Iran,’ said Obama.

In his remarks on Saturday, Ahmadinejad also said those Western leaders who made ‘insulting and irrelevant comments will be put on a fair trial’ by Iran at every ‘international gathering.’

In a broad-brush statement to remarks by European and US officials, he said ‘It is enough. Do not disgrace yourself further by such language and behaviour,’ and urged them to ‘correct’ their attitude towards Iran.

On Friday, foreign ministers of the Group of Eight leading powers said they were ‘concerned about the aftermath of the Iranian presidential election.

‘We fully respect the sovereignty of Iran. At the same time we deplore post-election violence which led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians and urge Iran to respect fundamental human rights.

‘The crisis should be settled soon through democratic dialogue and peaceful means,’ the ministers said after talks in Trieste, Italy.

Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mohsen Rezai said on Saturday he was prepared to join a panel on post-election complaints if the other losers do as well, the ILNA news agency reported.

‘I welcome the Guardians Council’s decision to set up a special board for the candidates’ complaints, even though this announcement came late,’ Rezai, a conservative, said in a letter to the electoral body.

‘This is a good move and I welcome it. If others (Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi) send their representatives to the board, I will do so.’ Mousavi and Karroubi have called for the cancellation of the poll, which led to the re-election of Mahmound Ahmadinejad for another four years, and the holding of a new one.

Rezai called on both men to take part in the panel in order to ‘remove electoral ambiguities and suspicions as well as obtain people’s rights.’

Earlier this week, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the council until Monday to issue a final decision on the disputed vote. It was not immediately if creation of the panel would lead to an extension of the deadline.

Rezai came in third out of the four candidates, polling just 678,240 votes, or 1.73 per cent, according to official results.

Iran has banned an ally of the country’s opposition leader Mirhossen Mousavi from leaving the Islamic state, the official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday.

Abolfazl Fateh, head of Mousavi’s media office, said the ban would not change his political stance, adding he was banned from leaving Iran because of his ‘role’ in post-election developments. Fateh had been studying for a doctorate in Britain, Reuters reported.

‘Such pressures can not push people like me to change our political stances,’ Fateh told IRNA. ‘The imposed ban will not change my political views.’

Iranian authorities have used a combination of warnings, arrests and the threat of police action to drive mass rallies off Tehran’s street since Saturday with smaller gatherings dispersed with tear gas and baton charges.

Iran’s top legislative body has said it found no major violations in the June 12 presidential election which it described as the ‘healthiest’ since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but said 10 per cent of ballot boxes would be recounted.

Tehran streets were calm on Saturday and life was back to normal.

Iranian authorities have barred journalists for international news organizations from reporting on the streets and ordered them to stay in their offices. This report is based on the accounts of witnesses reached in Iran and official statements carried on Iranian media.

A senior cleric on Friday urged Iran’s protest leaders to be punished ‘without mercy’ and said some should face execution — harsh calls that signal a nasty new turn in the regime’s crackdown on demonstrators two weeks after its disputed election, AP reported.

Hard-liners have ordered long sentences and hangings before, and some fear those awaiting trial by a judiciary whose verdicts reflect the will of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could face the most severe punishments the Islamic system can dish out.

‘Anyone who takes up arms to fight with the people, they are worthy of execution,’ Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami, a ranking cleric, said in a nationally broadcast sermon at Tehran University.

His call for merciless retribution for those who stirred up Iran’s largest wave of dissent since the 1979 Islamic Revolution came as Mir Hossein Mousavi, the nation’s increasingly isolated opposition leader, has been under heavy pressure to give up his fight and slipped even further from view.

Mousavi said he would seek official permission for any future rallies, effectively ending his role in street protests organized by supporters who insist he — not hard-line incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — won the June 12 election. And an aide said Mousavi’s Web site, his primary means of staying in touch with supporters, was taken down by unknown hackers.

Since the election, opposition protesters repeatedly have clashed with security forces who arrested hundreds of people, including journalists, academics and university students. At least 17 people have been killed, in addition to eight members of the pro-government Basij militia, officials have said.

President Barack Obama, joined at the White House by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, hailed the demonstrators in Iran and condemned the violence against them.

‘Their bravery in the face of brutality is a testament to their enduring pursuit of justice,’ Obama said. ‘The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. In spite of the government’s efforts to keep the world from bearing witness to that violence, we see it and we condemn it.’

Obama scoffed at accusations of US meddling in Iran by Ahmadinejad, who on Thursday called for ‘repentance’ from the US leader. Obama added that Mousavi has ‘captured the imagination or spirit’ of those in Iran who are ‘interested in opening up.’

Mousavi, meanwhile, has sent mixed signals to supporters, asking them not to break the law while pledging not to drop his challenge.

Amnesty International called the prospect of quick trials and capital punishment for some detainees ‘a very worrying development.’ It said Iran was the world’s No. two executioner after China last year, with at least 346 known instances of people put to death. The group also called on the regime to release dozens of detained journalists it said faced possible torture.

Khatami’s call for harsh penalties and even death for those who are found to have defied the Islamic system ‘is certainly an attempt to instill fear in people,’ said Ann Harrison, an Iran researcher at Amnesty.

Whether the regime will actually follow through — or need to — was unclear. After Iran’s 1999 student uprising, the regime sentenced scores to death, but many of those eventually were commuted to prison terms.

Either way, detainees face a fearsome, cleric-controlled judiciary. Courts often convene behind closed doors, rights groups complain that defendants sometimes have little access to lawyers, and the world learns of their fate only if a verdict happens to be announced on state TV.

‘Any chances of a trial that meets standards of due process would be very slim,’ said Aaron Rhodes, spokesman for the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.

Iranian officials have seized documents and computers from a political party that had backed opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in the June 12 presidential election, a newspaper reported on Saturday, AFP reported.

The reformist Etemad Melli newspaper said ‘officials inspected the office of Executives of Construction Party in Tehran and took away its documents and computers,’ without specifying when this took place.

The party, founded in 1995 by technocrats and allies of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, threw its weight behind Mousavi.

Several of its members have been jailed along with scores of reformist leaders, journalists and political activists in the aftermath of the presidential election, which returned incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power amid fraud allegations by Mousavi.

Mousavi’s campaign manager Ghorban Behzadian-Nejad has also been detained since Wednesday, the website of Etemad Melli party said.

More than two dozen Iranian journalists are among the hundreds of people being imprisoned by the hardline government in Tehran as part of the violent post-election crackdown, according to Amnesty International, AP reported.

As many as 30 journalists remain in detention, according to the human rights group, which calls the arrested reporters ‘prisoners of conscience.’

Mass gatherings have waned into scattered protests as the Iranian clergy that rules the country tightened its repression of opponents since the bitterly disputed election.

Two journalists reporting for foreign news outlets have also been arrested, according to Amnesty: Maziar Bahari of Newsweek, on June 21, and Iason Athanasiadis-Fowden of The Washington Times, who was arrested on or around June 19.

About 20 of 25 employees of the Iranian newspaper Kalameh Sabz were arrested at their office on June 22. Their whereabouts remain unknown, according to Amnesty.

Opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi established the newspaper earlier this year.

Amnesty International spokeswoman Sharon Singh said Amnesty has at least two sources on each of the arrests. In many cases family members bring their problems to the organization.

‘If nothing else, the authorities must immediately disclose the whereabouts of these journalists, ensure that they are not tortured or otherwise ill-treated and allow their families and lawyers access to them,’ said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa for Amnesty International.

‘Unless the authorities lift all unlawful restrictions on freedom of expression which includes the right of journalists to report on events and release all the journalists arrested, we can only assume they are trying to hide evidence of abuse and further silence any critical voice,’ Sahraoui added.

Keyvan Samimi Behbehani, editor of the banned Nameh magazine, was arrested at home, the group says. He is a member of the Center for Human Rights Defenders’ Arbitrary Arrests Committee.

Also arrested was Mohammad Ghochani, the editor of Etemad-e Melli. Amnesty International believes he is held in a Ministry of Intelligence prison.

Iran summoned Swedish Ambassador Magnus Werndstedt after an employee of its embassy in Stockholm was injured in what Tehran called a ‘terrorist’ attack, the official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday, AFP reported.

‘Following the terrorist attack by anti-revolutionary groups on Iran’s embassy in Stockholm on Friday, the Swedish ambassador was summoned immediately,’ the IRNA report said.

An embassy employee was hurt when protesters entered the compound and attacked him, Stockholm police said.

Between 150 and 200 people had been holding a demonstration outside the embassy in protest at post-election violence in Iran.

‘The protest was largely peaceful except for when an unconfirmed number of people got through the fence and attacked one of the embassy staff,’ said police officer Ulf Hoglund.

The employee, whose nationality was not known, was punched and kicked and received medical attention at the embassy. —Agencies