Ayatollah Abbasali Soleimani, a member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, was shot dead on Wednesday in an armed attack in the northern Iranian city of Babolsar. Tasnim news agency/EPA-EFE photo
April 26 (UPI) — A powerful senior Iranian cleric was shot dead Wednesday at a bank in northern Mazandaran province, according to Iranian news reports.
An Iranian official, the deputy governor of Mazandaran province, Ruhollah Solgi, confirmed the death of scribe Ayatollah Abbasali Soleimani. The Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
A video of the shooting circulated online shows Soleimani, who is in his 60s, sitting in a chair at a bank in the city of Babolsar when a security guard walks up behind him with a gun and opens fire.
The clerk falls back into his chair as his white turban falls to the ground behind him. The gunman is then seen casually walking away from his victim as the two men wrest the gun from his hands.
Solgi said the attacker had been arrested by security forces and was being interrogated.
Mazandaran Governor Mahmoud Hosseinipour told IRNA late on Wednesday that the attacker worked for a security company hired by the bank and that his actions were not related to terrorism.
No one else was injured in the shooting.
Soleimani was a member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of Islamic jurists that is constitutionally empowered to appoint, monitor and fire the country’s supreme leader, according to the Washington-based nonprofit. Brookings Institution.
Although a motive for the killing was unclear as of late Wednesday, the shooting comes amid women-led anti-regime protests that began in September after a 22-year-old woman died in police custody after being arrested for violating Iran’s draconian hijab. laws.
During the demonstrations, the clergy were targeted by protesters who threw off their turbans in the streets.
