Two Supreme Court judges were shot dead in the Iranian capital Tehran on Saturday. International news agencies report this. A man allegedly opened fire in the Palace of Justice, after which he also killed himself. A third judge and a bodyguard were injured in the attack.
The killed judges are Mohammad Moghisseh (68) and Ali Razini (71). According to Iranian state media, the two were charged with “fighting crimes against national security, espionage and terrorism.”
The perpetrator’s motive is unknown. He would not have been involved in cases that the Supreme Court had to consider. A spokesperson spoke on Iranian state television of an “infiltrator”, suggesting that he may have worked at the courthouse where the murders took place.
Razini was previously the target of an assassination attempt, when in 1999, attackers on a motorcycle attached an explosive to his car. The chief justice was injured, according to Iranian media, but survived the blast. The other judge had been on the US sanctions list since 2019. Moghisseh oversaw “numerous unfair trials, in which charges were left unfounded and evidence was ignored,” the US Treasury Department wrote at the time.
According to the AP news agency, both men are accused by activists of involvement in a wave of executions in 1988, at the end of the Iraq-Iran war. On the orders of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thousands of opponents of the regime were killed without trial under the supervision of so-called ‘death commissions’.
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