TEHRAN, Jan 22: Iranian hardliners thrashed speakers at a protest meeting against the wholesale rejection of pro-reform election candidates, hours before the expiry of a reformists' ultimatum warning of a poll boycott.
Some 200 members of the radical Hezbollah movement burst into the meeting in the ultra-conservative town of Hamedan in western Iran late Wednesday, the state news agency Irna reported.
Speakers were condemning the Guardian Council's decision to ban hundreds of reformists from standing in Feb 20 parliamentary polls for allegedly failing to satisfy certain religious qualifications.
Assailants injured a number of speakers, including student leader Said Razavi Fagih, reformist MP Hossein Loghmanian and Hossein Mojahed, a head of the main pro-reform party, Islamic Iran Participation Front, Irna said.
The reformist daily Yas-e No reported that Mojahed was hospitalised with his nose and an arm broken. The 12-member Guardians Council plunged Iran into one of its most serious crises when it disqualified 3,605 of the 8,157 people seeking to stand for the parliament.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last week ordered the council, all of whose members he directly or indirectly appoints, to be less stringent in its vetting procedure.
The council has since reinstated some 300 candidates, but none of them were sitting MPs. On Sunday, 18 reformist parties in a coalition said in an open letter to President Mohammad Khatami that they would decide on Thursday whether to boycott the election.
The coalition, led by the IIPF of Khatami's brother Mohammad Reza Khatami, said it would make its decision based on the extent of the Guardians Council's review process.
Several dozen reformists MPs were Thursday continuing a sit-in protest, which was launched on Jan 11 when the Guardians Council issued its blacklist, triggering charges of an attempted "coup" in the Islamic republic.
"So far, the files of 260 (rejected) candidates have been approved," said Seyed Mohammad Jahromi, an election official in the council, quoted by the state television.
He said 10 commissions have been set up to re-examine the vetting process and that their decisions would be "announced gradually over the coming days".Despite the ultimatum laid down by deputies, the Guardians Council has until Jan 30 to inform the interior ministry, which is in charge of organising the polls, of the final approved list of candidates, he said.
According to Tehran newspapers, five of Iran's vice presidents, including Massumeh Ebtekar, and six ministers, including Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mussavi-Lari, have handed in their resignations.
The US State Department, meanwhile, said Washington was keeping a close eye on the crisis. "We think it's important that Iran's leadership permit free and fair elections through an electoral process that meets international standards and that government needs to be responsive to the needs of the people," deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said. "This is an evolving situation and there are a lot of developments every day," he told reporters. "We are watching these events carefully."-AFP