Defeated reformist presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi, center, appeared at an opposition demonstration in Tehran on Monday. (Photo: Behrouz Mehri, AFP)

International Protests Grow Over Legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s Win

A worldwide storm of condemnation over the controversial election victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad grew on Monday, as a pro-government militia fired at opposition protesters in Tehran, killing at least one person, The Associated Press reported, citing one of its photographers. There was no immediate confirmation of the report.

The outcry occurred as hundreds of thousands of supporters of defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi marched in Tehran to protest what they said was Iran’s rigged election, defying a government ban.

A violent protest also broke out in an Iranian expatriate community and several European and Middle Eastern governments added their voices to doubts over the election outcome.

Police in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, fired several rounds of tear gas to break up a noisy protest held by several hundred expatriate Iranians.

Earlier, demonstrators gathered at the city’s United Nations building demanding that the body nullify the election, which the Iranian opposition allege was rigged.

The protesters, mainly students from the local Iranian community of some 9,000 people, continued their march along a road outside the UN building.

In Dubai, hundreds of Iranians from one of the Islamic republic’s largest expat communities defied a ban to protest outside their consulate in Dubai, chanting slogans branding Ahmadinejad a “dictator” and accusing Tehran of rigging Friday’s election.

Rallies were also held in Paris, London, Toronto, Berlin, Washington and Los Angeles.

The European Union has called on Tehran to start an investigation into the results, while Germany — Iran’s most important Western trading partner, along with Britain and France — joined the United States and Israel in questioning the result of the vote.

“The very serious doubts that have been raised about the free and fair nature of the election counting process are obviously of major concern to many people in Iran,” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said.

Semiofficial media in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy with no elected parliament, attacked the results as undemocratic.

“Falsifying the results is the easiest of tasks for a religious-security regime that does not believe in leaving to chance what it considers to be its right,” said the Saudi daily Asharq al-Awsat.

AFP, Reuters, Bloomberg

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