Hardline Iran cleric denies wanting to stay on key body

 The outgoing ultraconservative chairman of Iran's powerful Assembly of Experts denied Tuesday that efforts were being made to keep him on the key body despite him losing out in elections.

Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, 84, failed to retain his seat on the assembly, Iran's top clerical committee, when the public voted on February 26, the same day as parliamentary elections.

The Assembly of Experts has authority to monitor supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's work.

Should the 76-year-old ultimate authority in the Islamic republic die during the new assembly's eight-year term it would then pick his successor.

Yazdi's ejection was seen as a defeat for hardliners and as a symbolic win for moderates such as President Hassan Rouhani and former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who placed third and first in the Tehran election to the assembly.

A reformist alliance formed in support of Rouhani for the elections had campaigned against Yazdi's re-election.

Speaking on day one of the current assembly's final two-day gathering before its successor group formally takes office, Yazdi confirmed he would not be among its 88 members.

"I shall not be in your service in the future and I am happy about this," the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Yazdi as saying. He denounced as "a sheer lie" reports published online that he was trying to keep his seat.

"I deny that measures have been taken by me or by the Society of Seminary Teachers of Qom for someone to step aside and for me to come up and enter the Assembly of Experts.

"An absolutely decent and calm election was successfully held in a vast country and not a drop of blood was shed from anyone's nose. I congratulate all those who were elected."

Yazdi remains a member of the Guardian Council, an unelected constitutional watchdog that has yet to endorse the election results.

A second hardline cleric, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, an outspoken critic of reformists, also lost his assembly seat.

The Guardian Council also approved all candidates who stood in the elections for parliament and for the Assembly of Experts.

Source: AFP