Iranian authorities have executed a man convicted of murdering a senior cleric in northern Iran in April, the justice department said Wednesday.
On April 26, the accused shot and killed Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani while he was in a bank in the city of Babolsar, Mazandaran province.
The killer, whose identity was not revealed by authorities, was a bank guard.
CCTV footage released by local media showed him shooting the religious leader as he sat on a chair.
“The Qesas (Law of Retribution) sentence for the murderer of martyr Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani was carried out today after being approved by the Supreme Court,” said a local official, quoted by the justice agency Mizan Online.
The 75-year-old cleric held the positions of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's representative and was responsible for Friday prayers in several major cities in the country, notably Kashan in the center and Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchestan (in the south ). East). He held this position until 2019.
He was also one of the 88 members of the Assembly of Experts, a collegium responsible for appointing, monitoring and possibly firing the Supreme Leader.
This body generally consists of religious people elected by direct universal suffrage from a group of candidates approved by the Guardian Council of the Constitution for eight-year terms.
In April 2022, two clerics died in a knife attack in Mashhad, Iran's second largest city. Abdolatif Moradi, a 21-year-old suspected jihadist, was hanged for the crime two months later.
Attacks against representatives of the Iranian clergy are extremely rare. The previous case dates back to April 2022, when a suspected jihadist stabbed two Shiite clerics in the holy city of Mashhad (northeast).
According to a tally by Norway-based human rights group Iran Human Rights (IHR), more than 600 people had been executed in Iran by the end of October this year, the highest annual number in eight years.