Two prominent Iranian judges, Mohammad Mogheiseh and Ali Razini, were fatally shot in Tehran on Saturday.
The judges, who served on Iran’s Supreme Court, were allegedly involved in the 1988 mass executions of dissidents. According to officials, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which occurred at the Palace of Justice in Tehran, a heavily secured area.
Razini had been targeted previously in 1999, when attackers hurled an explosive at his vehicle, wounding him. Mogheiseh, on the other hand, had been under sanctions from the U.S. Treasury since 2019 for overseeing unfair trials and sentencing journalists and internet users to lengthy prison terms.
According to Asghar Jahangir, a spokesman for Iran’s judiciary, the shooter was an “infiltrator” who had worked at the courthouse where the killings took place.
The judiciary’s Mizan news agency reported that the attacker did not have a case in the Supreme Court nor was he a client of the branches of the court. Investigations are ongoing to identify and arrest the perpetrators of this “terrorist act.”
The 1988 executions, which both judges were allegedly involved in, were a series of sham retrials of political prisoners, militants, and others that resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. International rights groups estimate that between 5,000 to 30,000 people were executed, although Iran has never fully acknowledged the extent of the executions.
In a 2017 interview, Razini defended the panels that carried out the executions, stating, “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.”
