Iran's President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed recent accusations against him as "baseless" on Monday, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"Dissemination of baseless reports and information by certain Western circles, despite enjoying sophisticated intelligence and security apparatuses, is questionable," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.

Ahmadinejad, the hardline Tehran mayor, swept to power after winning a landslide victory in presidential runoff election on June 24.

But he was accused of involving in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy staff in Iran and the murder of an Iranian Kurdish leader and two associates in Vienna in 1989.

The President-elect rejected the charges as "ugly conspiracies".

"Despite all ugly conspiracies and behaviors of domestic ill-wishers and all hostile foreign powers and elements, the Iranian nation will go ahead with its wishes and demands," he said.

"All of the hegemonic powers and their advocates should respect the decision of the great Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad added.

Ahmadinejad added that the results of the presidential election demonstrated the free will and sovereignty of the Iranian nation and were a clear example of genuine democracy.

"How can they (Western states) claim to be advocates of democracy while at the same time attacking a nation's democratic action which was the result of participation of 30 million people in the election?" asked Ahmadinejad.

In November 1979, five months after Iran's Islamic Revolution, a group of students took over the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 staff hostage for 444 days. The incident led Washington to break ties with Tehran in 1980.

In a recent interview with the Washington Times newspaper, several former American hostages said they remembered Ahmadinejad took part in the hostage-taking.

On Saturday, an Austrian newspaper reported that some documents suggested that Ahmadinejad also played a role in the murder of Kurdish resistance leader Abdul-Rahman Ghassemlou in Vienna.

Ghassemlou and two of his assistants were shot dead at a Vienna apartment on July 13, 1989.

Iranian Foreign Ministry dismissed the accusations as "sheer lies".

(Xinhua News Agency July 5, 2005)