Ally: Mousavi rejects Iran vote recount proposal

Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi has rejected a government proposal to recount 10 percent of all ballot boxes from the disputed presidential election, an ally told Reuters on Saturday.

"This kind of recount will not remove ambiguities...There is no other way but annulment of the vote...Some members of this committee are not impartial," the ally quoted a Mousavi statement that was due to be published soon on his Web site, as saying.

Another beaten candidate, pro-reform cleric Mehdi Karoubi, also rejected the partial recount offer in a statement on his Web site.

Mousavi says there was massive fraud in the June 12 election, which was won by incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a landslide.

Since the election, opposition protesters repeatedly have clashed with security forces who beat them with batons, fired tear gas and water cannons and arrested hundreds of people. At least 17 people have been killed, in addition to eight members of the pro-government Basij militia, officials have said.

The crackdown has pushed protesters off the streets, ending days of unprecedented demonstrations that saw hundreds of thousands of people demanding the election be canceled and held again.

Many supporters of Mousavi have been shouting "God is great!" from the roofs of their homes - a practice dating to the 1979 Islamic Revolution - to register discontent with the regime.

Members of the Basij have been raiding homes and beating residents in an attempt to stop the chanting, Human Rights Watch said Saturday. The group also said that authorities were seizing satellite dishes to prevent citizens from seeing news broadcast from overseas. Iranian officials have blamed the BBC, Voice of America and other news channels for fomenting unrest on behalf of Western governments.

"While most of the world's attention is focused on the beatings in the streets of Iran during the day, the Basijis are carrying out brutal raids on people's apartments during the night," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the group's Middle East director.

"Witnesses are telling us that the Basijis are trashing entire streets and even neighborhoods as well as individual homes trying to stop thenightly rooftop protest chants."

Also Saturday, the official news agency IRNA reported that Ahmadinejad vowed on Saturday to toughen Iran's stance toward the West during his new term in office.