Iran’s interior minister has been accused of :disturbing public minds” by a member of the parliament’s National Security Commission because the minister said this weekend that “dirty money” from drug trafficking has found its way into funding election campaigns.
Avaz Heydarpour told Etemad daily that Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli has made statements that he regards “wrong and unfounded”.
He stressed: “There isn’t a single person in parliament that has any such connections that could warrant someone saying that this person has managed to engineer the elections with dirty money.”
In a live interview on national television, the interior minister said drug trafficking is yielding annual revenues of over 10 trillion toumans in the country and warned that some of that has been used to “purchase votes”.
Heydarpour added that if the minister of interior has any documents to establish these claims, he should forward them as classified information to the National Security Commission for examination.
He criticized the minister for undermining the electoral system with his statements.
