Talk of Karoubi's Imminent Arrest Swirls Again

State-run IRNA is reporting that the Iranian judiciary has launched a case against Mehdi Karoubi. The case against the senior cleric is said to deal with his accusations of rape occurring in Iran's notorious prisons, and an investigative commiteee has reportedly already prepared a file on Karoubi and sent it to the Tehran prosecutor's office for review.

As noted earlier, this is all being done under the watch of Sadegh Larijani, the new head of the Iranian Judiciary. While Khamenei's appointment of Larijani was originally largely viewed as a check (albeit a conservative one) on Ahmadinejad, recent developments involving the country's judiciary beg a reexamination of this premise. Although Ali Larijani (the head of Iran's parliament and the most powerful of the Larijani brothers) has been critical of the unelected President, his siblings have shown signs of being more radical. Just last week in a (booed) speech at Sharif University, Javad Larijani said that Mousavi's actions constituted an attempt at a "coup d'état" and linked the former Prime Minister to the terrorist MKO Mujaheddin group. (The majority of students in attendance disrupted and walked out on the speech and have subsequently been summoned for academic discipline and/or arrest).

If Karoubi's arrest indeed materializes, then a dangerous confrontation may be inevitable. On the one hand, such charges would come from the same judicial committee that has already rejected Karoubi's allegations despite overwhelming evidence documenting his claims, and it would thus not be surprising if the committee indicts Karobui based on its earlier findings. On the other hand, Rafsanjani has already made an ultimatum that he will resign from all of his posts should Karoubi be arrested. With the details of the National Unity Plan not even yet made public, it would be difficult to see how Rafsanjani could further maneuver between the Greens and the regime-insiders in the wake of such a development. It is very likely, however, that all of this is sabre-rattling coming from the coup government, meant to intimidate the opposition movement.

On another note, a Karoubi arrest should put further shame on the Nobel committee for its hasty selection of Barack Obama as the winner of the 2009 Peace Prize.

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UPDATE: Majlis' final report on post-election events has again been delayed and will not be delivered this week, as expected. The presentation of the report has already been postponed twice and was scheduled to be delivered last month. An anonymous member of the special committee has already said that "it has been established that certain prisoners [in Kahrizak] were raped with batons and bottles." The timing is interesting, to say the least.