Former Iranian president Rafsanjani dies of heart attack

Rafsanjani, who was 82, was a pivotal figure in the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979, and served as president from 1989 to 1997. He had been admitted to the Shohadaa Hospital in northern Tehran, one of his relatives, Hossein Marashi, was quoted as saying by the agencies. Rafsanjani was born on August 25, 1934 in the village of Nough in southern Iran into a wealthy family. He studied theology in the holy city of Qom before entering politics in 1963 after the shah's police arrested the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A confidant of Khomeini, Rafsanjani was the speaker of parliament for two consecutive terms until Khomeini's death in 1989. Rafsanjani's presidency, a breathing space after the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, was marked by reconstruction, cautious reform and repairs to Iran's relations with its Arab neighbours. But it was also marred by human rights violations, rampant inflation and difficult relations with Europe, not least with Britain after the "death sentence", or fatwa, handed down to writer Salman Rushdie by Khomeini. After serving a maximum two consecutive terms, Rafsanjani played an important role in the election of the reformist Mohammad Khatami, who succeeded him as president from 1997 to 2005. Rafsanjani sought a return to the presidency in 2005 but lost to hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a conservative backlash. It was a bitter defeat, but rather than retreating from public view, he remained in the limelight. Rafsanjani emerged as a moderate counter-figure to the ultra-hardliners clustered around Ahmadinejad -- under whom Iran's relations with the West plummeted -- and criticised the crackdown that followed Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in 2009. In recent years though, his influence within state institutions had waned.