The government of hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called on judiciary to clamp down on local media which it accused of "spreading lies", press reports said Sunday.
"The bulk of false reports against the government should be followed up by the public prosecutor," government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham wrote to the hard-line prosecutor of Tehran, Saeed Mortazavi, in a letter published by media.
Elham complained about newspaper editorials accusing Ahmadinejad of financial wrong-doing. "Are you waiting for a lawsuit to be filed against them?", Elham asked Mortazavi, without mentioning which newspaper he was referring to.
Iran's often turbulent experiment with reform following the 1997 election of Ahmadinejad's moderate predecessor Mohammad Khatami saw a proliferation of new titles and increasingly open criticism of the way the Islamic republic is run. But the judiciary, which remained controlled by hard-liners, hit back by shutting down hundreds of publications and detaining scores of journalists.