Two senior Iranian judges have been shot dead at the country’s Supreme Court, state media reports.
Judicial news site Mizan reported that judges Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh were killed after an armed man entered the court in the capital Tehran on Saturday morning.
The attacker then allegedly committed suicide while fleeing the scene. A bodyguard was also reportedly injured in the attack.
The motive for the attack is unclear, but the two judges are believed to have played a role in the persecution and assassination of opponents of the Islamic regime throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
In a statement to the official IRNA news agency, the judiciary’s media office described the attack as a premeditated assassination.
He also indicated that, according to initial findings, the attacker had not been involved in any case examined by the Supreme Court and that an investigation had been opened to identify and arrest any other person who may have been involved in the attack.
Judiciary spokesman Asghar Jahangir told Iranian state television that the attacker entered the court with a handgun before opening fire.
One of the judges, Razini, survived an assassination attempt in 1998.
The other, Moghiseh, was sanctioned by the United States in 2019the Treasury Department accusing him of having “overseen countless unfair trials, in which accusations were unfounded and evidence was ignored.”
At that time he was a judge at the Revolutionary Court in Tehran. He would have been appointed to the Supreme Court in 2020.
Moghiseh was also among seven Iranian judges sanctioned by Canada in 2023 for what the country described as “their role in gross and systematic human rights violations.”
