Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been put "under a spell" by his chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, an ultra-conservative cleric was quoted by local media on Sunday as saying.
"I've told some of my close friends that I am more than 90 percent certain that (Ahmadinejad) has been put under a spell. This is not natural at all," Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, believed to have once been a mentor of the president, told the weekly Shoma.
"No sane person does such things unless his free will has been taken away," Mesbah Yazdi said in reference to a crisis that has erupted since mid-April between Ahmadinejad and the hard-line conservative camp close to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"His actions have no justification. When he has 10 friends... does it make sense to constantly defy nine of them and defend (the actions of the) tenth person?" Mesbah Yazdi asked in an allusion to Mashaie. Mashaie, the president's top advisor and close relative who has worked alongside Ahmadinejad for more than 25 years, has been the target of a barrage of criticism from the conservative camp in past weeks.
Mashaie, who has been condemned for being too liberal, holding nationalistic views dating back to pre-Islamic Iran, and for having a great influence on the president, is now accused of leading a "current of deviation" aimed at destroying the Islamic regime.