Iranian authorities have arrested journalists for quoting statements related to the ambitions of Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi to assume the position of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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According to Iran International channel, the director of the Serat News website, Ali Ghaffarian, and media activist Hatef Salehi were arrested after they published a statement attributed to the former assistant for special affairs to the Supreme Leader’s office, Vahid Haghanian. In the statement, it was claimed that Ibrahim Raisi had sought his opinion on becoming the Supreme Leader after Khamenei.

The Serat News website confirmed the arrest of its director, according to what Ali Ghaffarian’s family reported, and stated that security forces arrested him since last Sunday evening. This website also mentioned that Hatf Salehi, a media figure close to the regime, was also arrested simultaneously with the director of Serat News. There is no information available about his condition or place of detention.

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Official charges against these two media figures close to the regime have not been announced yet. However, some Iranian media outlets attributed the arrest of Hatef Salehi to the publication of a statement by Vahid Haghanian, in which he claimed that Raisi had asked for his opinion on becoming the Supreme Leader after Khamenei.

It is worth noting that Salehi wrote on September 30th last year on the social media platform “X”, “Vahid Haghanian asked me some time ago: In 2017, Ibrahim Raisi asked me in private about my opinion regarding his political future and his transformation into a Supreme Leader.”

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This media activist close to the regime emphasized that “the forgery of the term ‘First Lady’ by Jamileh Alamolhoda should be explained in this context,” suggesting that Raisi was conspiring to reach the leadership of the Islamic Republic after the death of Ali Khamenei.

On the same day, the official news agency IRNA reported without mentioning the content of Hatef Salehi’s tweet that “Vahid Haghanian described the mentioned talk as pure slander.”

However, Hatef Salehi implicitly threatened to publish “the audio file of Vahid Haghanian’s statements about Raisi” on the “X” website.

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This comes at a time when the increase in the political influence of Jamileh Alamolhoda has reached a clear level, leading the matter to reach Iran‘s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei directly, who decided to intervene in this matter.

In this context, a source from the office of Iran‘s Supreme Leader said: “Of course, the issue of the President’s wife’s interference in government affairs has reached Khamenei, who followed the matter for a while, and after this follow-up, he expressed his anger and dissatisfaction with the significant presence of the President’s wife in political affairs.”

According to the source, the Supreme Leader sent a warning message to Raisi, urging him to reduce his wife’s political influence, saying, “Khamenei had no choice but to act flexibly at the beginning and sent a warning message to Raisi to see what he would do, but there has been no change in Raisi’s behavior or his wife’s behavior so far.”