Both men were named by activists and exiles as taking part in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 on the orders of Iran’s Supreme Leader.
A man fatally shot two prominent hard-line judges in Iran’s capital on Saturday, officials said, both of whom allegedly took part in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the shootings of 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 an assassination attempt in 1999.
Their killings, a rare attack targeting the judiciary, also come as Iran faces economic turmoil, the mauling of its Mideast allies by Israel and the return of Donald Trump to the White House on Monday.
Both clerics served on Iran’s Supreme Court, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. A bodyguard for one of the judges also was wounded in the attack at the Palace of Justice in Tehran, which also serves as the headquarters of the country’s judiciary and typically has tight security.
The attacker, who was armed with a handgun, killed himself, IRNA said.
“According to initial investigations, the person in question did not have a case in the Supreme Court nor was he a client of the branches of the court,” the judiciary’s Mizan news agency said. “Currently, investigations have been launched 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 shooter had been an “infiltrator,” suggesting he had worked at the courthouse where the killings took place.
Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, the Iranian Supreme Court has many branches spread across the country. It is the highest court in Iran and can hear appeals on decisions made by lower courts.
Razini had been targeted previously. In January 1999, attackers on motorcycles hurled an explosive at his vehicle, wounding him as he left work as the head of the judiciary in Tehran.
Another judge, Masoud Moqadasi, was successfully shot dead in Tehran in August 2005. He had been trying the case of a prominent journalist, a judiciary spokesman said at the time.
Mogheiseh had been under sanctions from the U.S. Treasury since 2019. At the time, the Treasury described him as having “overseen countless unfair trials, during which charges went unsubstantiated and evidence was disregarded.”
“He is notorious for sentencing scores of journalists and internet users to lengthy prison terms,” the Treasury had said. Mogheiseh had pressed charges against members of Iran’s Baha’i minority “after they reportedly held prayer and worship ceremonies with other members,” the Treasury said.
An Iranian-Canadian former cartoonist posted on X that Moghgesieh had sentenced him to four years in prison for satirising two of Iran’s supreme leaders.
Both men had been named by activists and exiles as taking part in the 1988 executions, which came at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq. After Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N.-brokered ceasefire, members of the exiled Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.
Iran ultimately blunted their assault, but the attack set the stage for the sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions.”
Iran executed thousands of political prisoners, activists say
International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed, while the MEK puts the number at 30,000. Iran has never fully acknowledged the executions, apparently carried out on Khomeini’s orders, though some argue that other top officials were effectively in charge in the months before his 1989 death.
The MEK did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
While Mogheiseh never addressed the accusation he took part in the 1988 “death commissions,” Razini gave a 2017 interview published by Iran’s Shargh newspaper in which he defended the panels as “fair and completely in accordance with the law.”
“Our friends and I who are among the 20 judges in the country, we did our best to ensure the security of that time and the years after and from then, we guaranteed that the hypocrites (the MEK) could never become powerful in this country,” he reportedly said.
