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TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian security agents on Tuesday raided offices connected to senior reformist leader Mahdi Karroubi, arresting four aides and closing the headquarters of his political party, which had been probing abuse of protesters arrested in the country's postelection crackdown.

The raids appeared aimed at crushing a campaign spearheaded by Karroubi to bring to light alleged torture and rapes of detainees — allegations that have deeply embarrassed Iran's government and clerical leadership.

The raids also come amid increasing calls by hard-line clerics and commanders in the Revolutionary Guard for the arrest of Karroubi and fellow opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and former President Mohamad Khatami. Arresting any of the three would be a major escalation in a crackdown that the opposition says aims to wipe out their movement completely.

Security agents raided the headquarters of Karroubi's National Confidence Party on Tuesday, arresting two party members and confiscating "documents and electronic devices containing information about the party's investigation into abuses of detained protesters in prisons," party spokesman Esmaeil Gerami Moghaddam told The Associated Press.

The agents then sealed the headquarters, Moghaddam said.

Security forces also raided Karroubi's personal office in another part of Tehran and arrested Mohammad Davari, an editor of the National Confidence Party Web site, Moghaddam said. Karroubi was at the office at the time of the raid, he said.

The security agents also confiscated CDs and documents concerning the abuse allegations and sealed the office.

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General Mohammad Ali Jafari said former president Mohammad Khatami and others encouraged the mass street protests after June's disputed election and challenged Khamenei, raising the possibility that they could face prosecution.

"The goal of post-election riots was to bring a change in the behaviour of the Islamic Republic, a change in directions, a deviation from principles," Jafari was quoted as saying by the official Islamic Republic news agency.

The regime has already put more than 100 activists and pro-reform politicians on trial, featuring forced confessions, in a move condemned by human rights groups. Among those in the dock are Khatami's former vice-president, Mohammad Abtahi. So far the government has not gone after the most senior reformists, including Khatami and Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims he would have won the vote if it had not been stolen by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In another sign of decisive action against senior supporters of the reformist movement, the semi-official Fars news agency reported that Iran was replacing 40 of its ambassadors.

"Some of these people officially took positions during the recent riots in Iran in support of rioters," Fars said. "It is supposed that the new ambassadors will be selected from committed experts loyal to the basis of the [1979 Islamic] revolution."

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BACK in 2007 the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) announced an important change of mission. From now on the main task for his 120,000 guards, as well as for the 3m or so members of the baseej paramilitary volunteer force that had just, and for the first time, been placed formally under his command, would be to deal with what he called internal threats. Just what he meant has grown increasingly clear since the disputed presidential elections in June that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an ex-guardsman, to power. The hardline faction centred on the IRGC embraces a network of former officers and like-minded men in other security branches. Despite outrage over the post-electoral crackdown, this faction has escalated its offensive against dissent even as it consolidates its hold over Iran’s politics and economy.

On August 24th state television broadcast the fourth show trial of prominent reformists in as many weeks. Between the prosecutor’s dramatic accusations and the defendants’ clearly coerced confessions, it looked as if the point was to destroy the reformist opposition for good and to broaden the purge to include powerful centrists, too. The fulsome confessions inculpated Iran’s two main reformist parties, as well as Muhammad Khatami, a reformist who served as president from 1997 to 2005, as actors in an alleged plot to discredit the June elections. Such charges chime with a chorus of calls by Mr Ahmadinejad’s allies, including the IRGC chief, to ban the parties outright and jail their leaders.

The IRGC leaders have united behind Mr Ahmadinejad not only to defend their shared idea of an Iran that is less of a republic but more stridently “Islamic”. They also want to protect a moneymaking machine. The IRGC controls a big chunk of the 70% or so of Iran’s economy that is state-run, with stakes in everything from dental and eye clinics to car factories and construction firms. Even “privatised” assets seem to fall into its hands or those of friends. The real private sector has grown hoarse crying foul, as recently when the state privatisation agency quietly passed ownership of Tehran’s main convention centre to an army pension fund.

Because their accounting is off-the-books and the ownership of these businesses is notoriously opaque, it is difficult to gauge their value. But in his first term Mr Ahmadinejad steered billions in uncontested oil, gas and large-scale infrastructure contracts to the IRGC. Its main construction firm, Khatam al-Anbya, could barely keep up with the workload. In 2006 alone the subsidiary received $7 billion to develop gas- and oilfields and for the refurbishment of the Tehran metro system. “It’s got much worse in the last four years,” says one local market analyst. “They’ve become a mafia. They undercut bids by abusing their access to free labour and exploiting their intelligence capabilities [to spy on competitors].”

The military wing of the establishment has upped the ante against opposition leaders.  Ahmadinejad claims that the opposition leaders are part of a "foreign plot" and should be prosecuted.

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Reporting from Beirut - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demanded the prosecution of opposition leaders today, raising the nation's political temperature just a day and a half after supreme leader Ali Khamenei sought to cool tempers in a conciliatory speech.

In a pre-sermon speech at weekly prayers in Tehran, the capital, Ahmadinejad did not explicitly name his rivals Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, but left little doubt he was speaking about them in calling for the punishment of the "masterminds" who allegedly spurred weeks of unrest that followed his widely disputed June 12 reelection.

Read more: Ahmadinejad calls for prosecution of Iran's opposition leaders