Following The Death of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri
According to one report, Sanei is likely to replace Hosein-Ali Montazeri as the leading clerical opponent of the regime and to be even more aggressive. He has already declared the Government illegitimate and after Montazeri’s death warned that it “cannot reverse the situation in the country with terror, killing, torture and imprisonment.”
A day after the funeral procession of Montazeri, around 1,000 members of Iran's Basij militia and "plainclothes men" attacked offices of Sanei in the central shrine city of Qom, a reformist website reported on 22 December 2009. The plainclothes militiamen broke the windows of Sanei's office and insulted him and his staff and also beat up his staff. They also put up posters of Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who has been a staunch defender of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial June re-election and who ordered a post-election crackdown on opposition protests. Police sided with the militia and prevented Sanei’s supporters from defending his office, the website said. There was no immediate official comment. However, earlier on Tuesday, the semi-official Fars News Agency said pro-government theology students had staged a rally in Qom to protest "the insult against sanctities" during Montazeri's funeral procession. The demonstration ended outside Sanei's home, Fars said, but it was not clear whether it was linked to the attack on Sanei's house reported by the aforementioned reformist website. The demonstrators chanted "The city of Qom is no city for hypocrites," and signed a statement calling for Sanei to be defrocked, Fars reported. One of the signatories, cleric Ahmad Panahian, said: "The trenches of the hypocrites in Qom must be destroyed."
On October 3, 2010, news sites linked with Iran’s political opposition movement reported that Sanei's website was blocked. According to nyt.com "Internet users who attempted to access them ... were automatically redirected to a standard Iranian government filtering page which offers links to government-authorized web sites ... and the official web site of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."
Read more about this topic: Yousef Saanei
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