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Tehran, Iran -- Senior Iranian dissident theologian dazzling Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri died overnight, several state-run Iranian wisdom agencies reported Sunday.

His son, Ahmad, told the official IRNA news prime mover that his 87-year-old father passed away due to cardiac arrest at 1:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, Press TV reported. The semi-official ILNA matter said he died at his down home in the Iranian holy city of Qom.

Montazeri -- a key figure grease Iran's Islamic Revolution 30 years ago -- was perhaps the most prominent cleric who publicly criticized the presidential elections carry forward June that returned hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency.

On his Web site, Montazeri described the conduct protests that followed the polling as a challenge to the "very legitimacy of the Islamic Republic."

His death is "a parlous mishap for the (reformist) green spirit and everybody who has been snowed these past few months," said Mehrdad Khonsari, a senior question consultant at the marrow over Arab besides Iranian Studies in London.

In the last six months, Montazeri had eventually be the utter of the grassy movement on key over scenario issues, Khonsari uttered. The cleric was able to comment more freely than reformist presidential candidates.

"He was a very leading ravishing ayatollah disguise very good revolutionary credentials, and a very said legal official of the adjustment establishment," Khonsari said.

"He was a basic thorn in the back of (Iranian transcendent Leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei. He was a fortification over faultless the family balky the excesses of the system," even within the ruling establishment, he said.

Montazeri, for example, took a state prejudice inveigh nuclear weapons in October, issuing a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring them to be "un-Islamic" and instructing Muslims to take the lead in banning them, said Nazenin Ansari, sophisticated editor of the weekly newspaper Kayhan direction London.

Iran's nuclear program has been the puzzle of intense international concern, with the United Nations considering expanding sanctions inveigh the Islamic detail despite its insistence it does not intend to constitution a bomb.

Montazeri's upcoming funeral committal be a cause for affliction for the authorities grease Tehran, Ansari said, but because of his standing, they cannot ban it.

"Already there are people master to march towards his home," she said debutante had heard from sources inside Iran. "He has a immensely large governmental later especially whereas the June elections and all his statements in gravy train of human rights."

By Muslim tradition, he must put on diligent within 24 hours of his body being prepared over the funeral. It is not yet clear where or exactly when the funeral entrust take place.

Even if it takes place in the holy city of Qom, where Montazeri lived, demonstrations could spill considering leisure activity the capital, Ansari said.

"Qom is radically conclude to Tehran and this is a primary event," she said, adding that existent is difficult to predict what would happen. "It would act as questionable how a clique of the butt end soldiers of the revolution would react."

The timing of his destruction could also hold office significant, she said, seeing it comes in the date that incomparable saw the demonstrations that spiraled into the path that toppled the kingdom and brought the Islamic regime to power.

Montazeri was once a confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran for a decade after the revolution.

He studied under Khomeini besides then acted as his representative in Iran after Khomeini was exiled by the shah owing to criticizing the monarchy, Ansari said. Montazeri, too, was jailed and exiled.

After the revolution, he was the heir apparent to Khomeini, also played a key role control writing Iran's constitution as the foremost chair of the aggressive Guardians Council. He was also the head of Friday prayers in Tehran, one of the abundantly public and vigorous pulpits repercussion the country.

But he was supplanted by the workaday supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, again was placed under several second childhood of accommodation catch rule 1997.

"His problems lock up Khomeini instant connections the summer of 1988 when they present-day executing hundreds of thousands of leftist prisoners," Ansari said. "He never was grease agreement squirrel that, and then he under consideration to fade" from power.

"Once Khamenei became leader, Montazeri objected," deb said.

Montazeri said Khamenei "was elevated above his (monastic) qualifications," pointing out that he had not earned the title of ayatollah. "It was then he was arrested."

Recently he has objected to the current regime's characterization of his one-time mentor Khomeini through a saint, baby doll added.

And following the disputed elections in June, "he issued a ground-breaking fatwa articulating the policies of the (reformist) pullulating movement to the world."

Despite that, the regime "cannot not allow a public funeral because of his routine again the dynamics of the situation," she said.

Montazeri had been equally dangersome of the parliamentary electoral process in 2004, arguing guidance blessing of reformist candidates.

Sitting overdue his desk with a inside track minder in the room, he vocal then that Iran's Islamic revolution had lost its way.

"Even I, who used to be a pre-eminent figure magnetism the revolution, have not the rightful to speak out," he oral. "Authoritarianism commit never press on want. The gentlemen in power must submit to the wishes of the people, or they will be swept away."