TEHRAN — The leader of Iran’s protest movement accused the government on Wednesday of lies, fraud and murder, while the government turned its ire on the United States, accusing the Obama administration of stirring the unrest over Iran’s disputed election.
The increasingly bitter rhetoric came as supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi defied a ban on unauthorized rallies and took to the streets again, as they have each day since the Interior Ministry declared Saturday that Mousavi lost the balloting Friday to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a landslide.
Mousavi, 67, a former prime minister who contends he won the election, demanded that the country’s legal authorities stop plainclothes police and vigilantes from attacking his supporters. In a statement on his website, he said the huge march Monday by hundreds of thousands of his backers — the largest unsanctioned demonstration in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution — had “infuriated” the government and its paramilitary forces, which he called the “Disciples of Lies.”
“They tried to make bitter the sweetness of this great gathering with their beastly attacks,” he said, referring to the killing of seven protesters by a government-backed, volunteer militia known as the basij, which fired into a crowd outside its local headquarters at the end of Monday’s march. Mousavi called it “an appalling murder.”
The government, meanwhile, summoned the Swiss ambassador, who represents U.S. interests in Tehran, to complain of “intolerable” interference by the United States in Iranian internal affairs, state television reported. Iranian authorities had made similar complaints earlier this week to the ambassadors of Germany, France, Britain and the Czech Republic.
In Washington, the State Department rejected the Iranian charge, saying the United States was in “good company.”
“As the president has said, we are not interfering in the debate that Iranians are having about their election and its aftermath,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. “This is not about the United States.”
Efforts to clamp down on outside sources of information continued Wednesday as authorities blocked CNN’s website and reportedly jammed some BBC satellite television broadcasts. Cellphone service, including text messaging, was turned off for the fifth day in a row, and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter remained partially blocked.
Arrests of opposition leaders continued Wednesday.
