Relative of Iran opposition leader arrested

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — The wife of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said Thursday that her 62-year-old brother is among the hundreds arrested in Iran’s postelection crackdown, as Mousavi warned that the country is becoming “more militarized” amid the turmoil.

Mousavi implicitly accused the security forces of exceeding their powers under Iran’s constitution, suggesting that the “near-coup d’etat atmosphere” was a danger to Iran’s Islamic Republic.

Police, the elite Revolutionary Guards and the Basij militia arrested more than 2,500 people in their heavy crackdown against protests that erupted in support of Mousavi after the disputed June 12 election. More than 500 of them remain in prison, including many top politicians from pro-reform political parties, human-rights lawyers, journalists and activists. Arrests have continued in recent weeks.

The turmoil has been the biggest challenge to Iran’s ruling clerics in decades, and the Revolutionary Guards force has taken a prominent role in defending the leadership.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday said the upheaval has made it unlikely Iran will respond any time soon to the Obama administration’s attempts to engage in dialogue with Tehran, its top rival in the region.

“We’ve certainly reached out and made it clear that’s what we’d be willing to do, even now, despite our absolute condemnation of what they’ve done in the election and since,” she told the British Broadcasting Corp. “But I don’t think they have any capacity to make that kind of decision right now.”

Mousavi claims to have won the election and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory was fraudulent. Hundreds of thousands of his supporters marched in protests in the weeks after the election, until the demonstrations were shattered by the crackdown.