TEHRAN, June 29 -- A top supervisory body reviewing Iran's disputed June 12 election formally dismissed all opposition complaints of fraud Monday and affirmed a landslide victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, setting off shouts of protest from Tehran's rooftops but leaving opponents with few options amid an intensifying government crackdown.
In a letter to Interior Minister Sadegh Mahsouli, the head of the Guardian Council said members reached their "final decision" on the election results after an extended review, Iran's state television and radio network reported.
"The Guardian Council held numerous sessions and agreed that the complaints were not valid and has now approved the soundness of the 10th presidential election," said the letter from Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati. He said that "most of the complaints were not cases of vote-rigging or electoral violation or were minor violations that might happen in every election and can be ignored." He called the election "a golden page . . . of Iran's democratic history," according to an official translation.
The recount of 10 percent of ballot boxes went ahead over the objections of two opposition presidential candidates, who demanded that the election be annulled on grounds of massive vote-rigging.
The two -- Mir Hossein Mousavi, 67, who served as prime minister for eight years in the 1980s, and Mehdi Karroubi, 71, a Shiite cleric and former speaker of parliament -- refused to participate in a special committee set up by the council to examine their complaints. Their spokesmen said that the committee would be biased and that its review would not be sufficiently broad.
A final attempt by the Guardian Council to bring Mousavi before the committee Monday also failed, for unspecified reasons, said Abbas Ali Kadkhodai, a council spokesman.