TEHRAN: Iran's judiciary warned opposition leaders on Wednesday that prosecutors had enough evidence to try them and accused them of offences tantamount to those of the rebel People's Mujahedeen.

"I say to the leaders of the sedition that we have enough evidence against you," ILNA news agency quoted judiciary chief Sadeq Larijani as telling prosecutors in the strongest threat yet that opposition leaders could be tried.

"If the regime has shown tolerance until now, don't suppose that we do not understand. How can we not find out when it is the duty of the judiciary to deal with such cases?"

For the first time, Larijani compared the actions of opponents of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial June re-election to the regime's most despised enemy, the People's Mujahedeen.

Using the regime's standard term of abuse for the rebels, he likened the "actions of the leaders of the sedition to those of the hypocrites at the start of the revolution."

He was alluding to the People's Mujahedeen's initial support for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's regime against ethnic minority nationalists and the left following the 1979 ouster of the shah.

The group then broke decisively with Khomeini and went on to make common cause with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq during the two countries' devastating 1980-88 war.

Larijani said the behaviour of the opposition leaders was "contrary to national security" and a "clear crime."

They had made statements that allowed "Western countries to make out that the government of the Islamic republic was in disarray," he said.

He singled out their allegations of the sexual abuse of detainees arrested during June protests over Ahmadejad's re-election, saying they had "lied in their claims that rape had been committed in detention centres."

The judiciary chief did not refer to either of the two main opposition leaders by name but his comments were a clear warning to the two Ahmadinejad challengers who still reject the official election results, former prime minister Mir Hossein Moussavi and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karoubi.

Both men have continued to call for protests against what they charge was massive electoral fraud.