A top Iranian cleric, close to the country’s supreme leader, was assassinated on Wednesday, in a rare attack on a senior religious figure at a time of continued unrest, authorities said.
Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani was fatally shot by a single assailant in a bank in Babolsar, in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran near the Caspian Sea. State media said authorities had arrested a suspect at the scene and were investigating who ordered the killing. No motive was disclosed.
The assassin was a security guard at the bank, who appears to have acted spontaneously, local Governor Mahmoud Hosseinipour told state TV.
Soleimani was a member of the Assembly of Experts, a deliberative body empowered to appoint the supreme leader of Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei either directly appoints or vets the assembly’s membership.
The incident comes after months of nationwide anti-government rallies, following the death in September of Mahsa Amini while she was in police custody in Tehran.
Soleimani was Khamenei’s former clerical envoy to Zahedan, the capital of Sistan-Baluchistan, a province on Iran’s eastern border that has long been a centre of unrest.
In late September, more than 80 people were killed in clashes with security forces in the provincial capital, even after the nationwide protests died down in much of Iran.
Soleimani’s is the latest in a long line of assassinations inside Iran, though it is the first time in recent memory that a religious figure has been targeted.
Iran accused Israel of killing one of its top nuclear scientists in 2020 and carrying out an attack on its underground nuclear programme at Natanz in 2021.
In May last year, Israel’s operatives killed an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer outside his Tehran home, after he led the group’s efforts to assassinate opponents of Iran around the world.
[Photo: Tasnim News via AFP – Getty Images]