TEHRAN Iran's Interior Minister Seyed Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari warned here Tuesday against factional and ethnic fighting in the country, saying such disputes should be nipped in the bud.

"We should stem the crises and insecurity to have them uprooted," Lari told a seminar on security. He said that security is the most valuable thing for a society.

Lari said that the country should reach a national consensus on political and security issues.

He called on the country's officials to fight against those who create insecurity, regardless of their social and political leanings.

Lari condemned a recent abortive plot in the southern city of Shiraz where a group intended to discredit President Mohammad Khatami by distributing posters showing his picture beside that of a late nationalist leader. Lari said the Fars governor general should comment on the issue.

The group had printed and distributed some 150,000 of such posters with the twin pictures of Khatami and Mohammad Mosaddeq in the southern Province of Fars during Khatami's recent visit. Mosaddeq was ousted, arrested and jailed in the wake of a CIA-led coup that brought the runaway Shah of Iran back to throne in August 1953.

Political wrangling is taking a momentum in Iran as the next presidential election approaches.

The incumbent President Mohammad Khatami was elected president on May 23, 1997 by over 20 million votes (69 percent of the total cast) for a term of four years which will end in May.

In late July he made known his intention to run for a second term in office and said he would come up with an even "more progressive program for reforms."

Last month, the right wing Islamic Coalition Society, warned of the likelihood of a low turnout at presidential polls in the event the public should lose its faith in the upcoming elections as a result of certain contingent developments.

(IRNA)