At a June 23 meeting with the editors of his newspaper, the Etemad-e Meli daily, Iranian presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said that he does not accept the election results, and does not see an Ahmadinejad government as legitimate.
He said that he had anticipated fraud in the election, but thought that the extensive turnout would thwart the attempts by certain circles to steal the election.
He stressed that during marches, the people were not changing slogans against the regime – rather, they were demanding their rights and the exposure of the real voting results. This, he said, was in contrast to certain circles' false claims that these were "zionist shouts" against the Islamic Revolution.
Karroubi demanded an investigation into how mob networks, which he called a "cancerous growth," had been created, and into how they had changed the fate of the elections.
Karroubi also rejected claims that the protestors had deviated from the framework of the revolution, saying that all four presidential candidates had headed Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and were former regime leaders.
Source: Saham News, Iran, June 24, 2009
