Even before his daughter and four other relatives were briefly detained on Sunday, one of the big mysteries to envelop Iran since the disputed presidential election has been the role of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
One of Iran’s wealthiest and most powerful men, a former right-hand man to the father of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr. Rafsanjani was an outspoken critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the campaign and a supporter of the opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi.
His absence from public view, coupled with the provocative, though temporary, detention of his family members appears to have escalated an internal battle between two classes of Iran’s political elite. Even if the street protests are stopped, the split threatens to paralyze the state and undermine the legitimacy it has tried to construct since the 1979 revolution, analysts say.