News

Updated: Thursday, July 09, 2009

11:40GMT—7:40AM/EST

Washington, 9 July (WashingtonTV)—A spokesperson for Iranian opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, on Wednesday called on the European Parliament to press European Union states not to recognize the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a renowned Iranian filmmaker, said that Ahmadinejad’s government was now a “100 percent dictatorship” that needed to be challenged, reports the Associated Press.

He said that the international community must not allow that government to “torture the [Iranian] people, spread terrorism and threaten others with missiles.”

Makhmalbaf called on “the peoples of the world not to recognize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad officially as the president of Iran, just as the Western powers have not accepted the coup d'état in Honduras,” reports the website of the European Parliament.

He told the lawmakers that the Iranian people had been “taken hostage” by Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Noting the scores of arrests following the disputed presidential election and Iran’s crackdown on media and foreign journalists, as well as the arrest of local staff at the British embassy in Tehran, Makhmalbaf said that the European Union should tighten its sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Several lawmakers argued that supp... >>>