The wife of death-row Iranian academic Hashem Aghajari,...

The wife of death-row Iranian academic Hashem Aghajari, as well as several jailed liberal opposition members and journalists signed up to stand in Iran's forthcoming municipal elections, officials said. The interior ministry's election chief, Mohammad Ali Moshafegh, told IRNA that a total of 210,000 people had presented their candidatures for the February 28 vote. Unlike for parliamentary and presidential elections, candidates for municipal polls are not first vetted by the Guardians Council - a conservative-controlled oversight body that has in the past blocked hundreds of reformist candidates from standing. "Very few candidates will have their cases rejected this time," said Moshafegh, emphasising that it was reformists who controlled the municipal elections vetting procedure. The staging of municipal elections in 1999 - the first since the 1979 Islamic revolution - were seen as a step forward for the reforms of President Mohammad Khatami and his attempts to decentralise key powers. Officials said Aghajari's wife, Zahra Behnoudi, had presented her candidature for Tehran municipality. Aghajari, a disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and supporter of Khatami, drew the anger of the country's religious establishment when he delivered a speech in July 2002 questioning clerics' right to rule in Iran, and on November 6 was sentenced to hang by a Hamedan court. The verdict sparked widespread student protests and even unease from prominent conservatives, forcing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to step in to ease the crisis and order a review of the verdict.