DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A man shot and killed two prominent radical judges in the Iranian capital on Saturday, officials said, both of whom were believed to have participated in the case. mass execution of dissidents in 1988.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the shootings against the judges, clerics Mohammad Mogheiseh and Ali Razini. However, Razini’s involvement in the 1988 executions had likely made him a target in the past, including during an assassination attempt in 1999.
Their killings, a rare attack on the justice system, also come as Iran faces economic turmoil, the mutilation of its Middle Eastern allies by Israel and the return of Donald Trump to the White House on Monday.
The two clerics served on Iran’s Supreme Court, the official IRNA news agency reported. The bodyguard of one of the judges was also injured in the attack on Tehran’s Palace of Justice, which also serves as the seat of the country’s judiciary and usually has tight security.
The attacker, who was armed with a handgun, committed suicide, IRNA reported.
“According to initial investigations, the person in question did not have a case before the Supreme Court nor was he a client of the court’s branches,” the Mizan judicial news agency reported. “Currently, investigations have been opened to identify and arrest the perpetrators of this terrorist act.”
Asghar Jahangir, a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, separately told Iranian state television that the gunman was an “infiltrator”, suggesting he had worked at the courthouse where the killings took place.
Unlike the American Supreme Court, the Iranian Supreme Court has numerous branches located throughout the country. It is Iran’s highest court and can hear appeals of decisions made by lower courts.
Razini had already been targeted. In January 1999, attackers on motorcycles threw an explosive at his vehicle, injuring him as he left his job as head of the judiciary in Tehran.
Mogheiseh had been under U.S. Treasury sanctions since 2019. At the time, the Treasury described him as having “overseen countless unfair trials, in which accusations were unfounded and evidence was ignored.”
“He is known for having sentenced numerous journalists and Internet users to long prison terms,” the Treasury said. Mogheiseh had filed charges against members of Iran’s Baha’i minority “after they allegedly held prayer and worship ceremonies with other members”, the Treasury said.
Both men had been named by activists and exiles as having taken part in the 1988 executions, which took place at the end of the long war between Iran and Iraq. After Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, agreed to a U.N.-brokered ceasefire, members of Saddam’s heavily armed exile Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, Hussein, crossed the Iranian border in a surprise attack.
Iran eventually blunted its assault, but the attack opened the way for new sham trials of political prisoners, activists and others, which would become known as “death commissions.”
International rights groups estimate that up to 5,000 people were executed, while the MEK puts the figure at 30,000. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions, apparently carried out on orders from Khomeini, although some argue that other senior officials were actually in charge in the months before his death in 1989.
The PMOI declined to comment when contacted by The Associated Press.
Although Mogheiseh never responded to the accusation that he participated in the 1988 “death commissions”, Razini gave an interview published in 2017 by the Iranian newspaper Shargh in which he defended the commissions as ” fair and fully in accordance with the law.
“Our friends and I who are among the 20 judges in the country, we did our best to ensure security at that time and in the years that followed, we ensured that the hypocrites (the MEK) could never become powerful in this country,” he reportedly said.
