Banned Iranian lawmakers challenge Khamenei

Reformist lawmakers banned from contesting this week's Iranian parliamentary election challenged Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday to say whether he was behind their exclusion by a panel of hard-line clerics.
"Do the members of the Guardian Council dare to resist your orders? Or is it that, as rumours say, despite your public statements, they were permitted by you to disqualify these people illegally and widely?" the deputies asked in an unusually blunt six-page open letter to Khamenei.
Some 80 sitting lawmakers were barred from seeking re-election on vague Islamic grounds. About 30 of them held a protest meeting in the parliament building three days before Friday's vote, and distributed the letter to journalists.
In it, they told Khamenei that the Guardian Council had been plotting to disqualify them for two years, using "intelligence activities by unofficial parallel organisations".
They also disputed his suggestion that Iran's enemies had infiltrated the reformists' ranks.