bild

Eighty-one-year-old Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Iran's most-senior dissident cleric, talks with well-wishers after the lifting of his house arrest, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2003, in the city of Qom, Iran, 78 miles (125 kilometers) south of Tehran. Montazeri was freed after five years of house arrest for criticizing the nation's leader. Iran's Special Clergy Court said the house arrest was lifted because of Montazeri's age and ill health. Montazeri was in line to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's 1979 revolution, as Iran's supreme leader before the pair fell out months before Khomeini died of cancer in 1989. (KEYSTONE/AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)