Thousands of mourners gathered in the Iranian city of Qom following the death of leading reformist cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, offering protesters a fresh rallying point for confrontation with the government. Montazeri, who died early Sunday, Dec 20, aged 87, was buried at the Ma’asoumeh shrine, one of the holiest in Shia Islam, on Monday.

The event threatened to turn into a security nightmare for the authorities amid reports that thousands were travelling from as far away as Isfahan and Najafabad, Montazeri’s birthplace. Reformist websites reported that the road between Tehran and Qom was clogged with motorists heading to the funeral.

Riot police were deployed throughout Qom in preparation for a mass turnout of anti-government demonstrators, while security forces surrounded Montazeri’s house. The reformist website Rah-e Sabz reported that some political activists had been contacted by intelligence agents and warned that they would face arrest if they tried to attend the funeral.

Montazeri, who had long been banished from Iran‘s theocratic hierarchy, had emerged as a spiritual leader for the opposition Green Movement after denouncing last June’s re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as fraudulent and the subsequent crackdown as un-Islamic.

Since the poll, he had been in regular contact with the two defeated reformist candidates, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Once seen as heir apparent to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Montazeri was sidelined and defrocked in 1988 after criticizing the mass execution of political prisoners. News of his death, attributed by his doctor to a combination of old age and chronic heart and prostate conditions, triggered fresh dissent on Iran’s university campuses, the focal point of repeated post-election clashes between students and security forces.

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