Two supreme court judges shot dead in Tehran

Two of Iran’s top judges have been killed in what appears to be a courtroom shooting the supreme court of the land.

Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh were killed when a gunman entered a court in Tehran on Saturday morning.

The boy allegedly committed suicide while fleeing the scene, according to the Judiciary website, Mizan. Another security guard was injured in the attack.

The motive for the attack is unclear, but both judges are said to have helped torture and kill opponents of the Islamic State throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

In a statement to state news agency IRNA, the court’s press office described the attack as a deliberate killing.

It added that, according to the initial findings, the attacker was not involved in any case before the Supreme Court, and an investigation has been launched to identify and arrest other people who may have been involved in the conspiracy.

The spokesman for the court, Asghar Jahangir, told Iranian state television that the attacker entered the court with a gun before opening it.

One of the judges, Razini, survived an assassination attempt in 1998. He was one of Iran’s most senior judges.

Another, Moghiseh, was was approved by the US in 2019and the Ministry of Finance accused him of “supervising many unjust cases, where the cases had no evidence and the evidence was not followed up”.

At the time, he was a judge at the Tehran Judicial Court. He is said to 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 said was “their role in human rights abuses”.