Ahmadinejad vows to punish bullying powers

IRAN: Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that his government will severely punish bullying powers, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.

The new government will slam those bullying powers (some Western states), which fanned the flames of Iran's post-election unrest, IRNA quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

Iranian officials have recently used their bitter rhetoric against some Western countries, accusing them of meddling in Iran' s post-election unrest.

Tehran says that the West irresponsibly interfered in Iran's internal affairs in an attempt to implement a 'velvet coup' against the country's religious system. On Tuesday, spokesmen of U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said respectively their leaders would not congratulate the Iranian president.

"No one is waiting for the congratulatory messages from the Western leaders," Ahmadinejad responded to the explanations during his swearing-in ceremony.

On Wednesday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term amid prolonged controversy over his landslide victory in the presidential election on June 12.

Tehran, Xinhua