TEHRAN, June 1: Iran’s parliamentary speaker called on Saturday for freeing Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, the disgraced ex-successor-designate of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, from his five-year-old house arrest.

“In my opinion, the house arrest must be lifted,” Mehdi Karubi told reporters.

Montazeri, 80, was disgraced in a power struggle to succeed Khomeini, who died in 1989, and has been locked up in his home in the holy city of Qom since 1997.

The dissident, still a fierce opponent of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who took over from Khomeini but whom he is considered to tower over in his knowledge of Islam, is also banned from all contacts with the press.

Karubi said Iranians opposed to Montazeri’s release were split in camps between those who feared his life could be in danger if he was freed and those who worried his release could create “problems”.

But Karubi said that, if the house arrest was lifted, he thought Montazeri would have to tread “carefully”. Iran has been roiled by a vicious political struggle between its power-wielding conservatives and popular reformist movement.

During his years in detention, some reformists have come to see the religious scholar as a liberal alternative to the iron-fisted rule of Khamenei and his conservative backers.

However, Montazeri rose to fame as a hardline ideologue in the 1979 revolution, but his positions were said to soften over the course of the next decade.

In his memoirs published on the Internet in 2000, Montazeri said he tried to prevent the summary execution of thousands of opponents to the Khomeini regime in 1988.

Members of his family and parliament members have been jailed or brought to court for speaking in favour of Montazeri and airing his views in public. —AFP