TEHRAN: Two losing contenders in Iran’s presidential election denounced the result yesterday in clear defiance of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s next Cabinet would be illegitimate.

Moderate former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and preacher Mehdi Karoubi unleashed fierce attacks on the outcome of the June 12 vote that returned Ahmadinejad to power as president for a second term.

Pro-reform ex-President Mohammad Khatami also criticized the vote and the mass arrests of demonstrators that followed, declaring in a strongly worded statement: “Opp-ressing people will not help end the protests.”

Although hard-liners have appeared to be in the driving seat since security forces overcame street protests that erupted in the days after the poll, Mousavi and Karoubi have not yielded.

Both men issued statements on their websites describing Ahmadinejad’s future government as “illegitimate” — even though Khamenei, the country’s ultimate arbiter, has upheld the result and thrown his weight behind the president.

“It is our historic responsibility to continue our protests and not to abandon our efforts to preserve the nation’s rights,” Mousavi wrote, urging the release of “children of the revolution” — meaning scores of reformist political figures rounded up during Iran’s gravest unrest since the shah fell in 1979.

Karoubi, a reformist former Parliament speaker who came last in the poll, also pledged to fight on. “I don’t consider this government legitimate,” his statement said.

“Visible and invisible forces blocked any change in the executive power,” he said, demanding the release of the “thousands” of people he said had been arrested since the poll.

Iran’s police chief, Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, put the total number of detainees at 1,032 and said most had been freed. The rest were “referred to the public and revolutionary courts,” the semiofficial Fars news agency quoted him as saying. He said 20 “rioters” had been killed and more than 500 police injured.

A leading reformist party said the election had been a “coup d’etat” that harmed the legitimacy of the establishment. “We announce that the result is unacceptable,” said a statement by the Islamic Iran Partici-pation Front, established by reformers close to Khatami.

In his statement, the former president demanded of the authorities: “If you want to calm the atmosphere, why are you carrying out mass arrests?” Addressing the judiciary, he said: “If these people have committed crimes, why are their legal rights as citizens not preserved, why don’t they have access to a lawyer, why are they not tried in a court, why haven’t they been charged?” Khatami added: “Obtaining confessions in front of cameras is a useless old method ... confessions under pressure are not valid.”

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