On Saturday 18 January, two of the Iranian regime’s most barbarous hanging-judges were shot dead in their offices in Tehran. Senior clerics, Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh, were killed by a member of the judiciary staff, armed with a handgun, who had access to the tight security of the Palace of Justice. A bodyguard of one of the judges was wounded in the attack. The gunman took his own life before security forces arrived. It was a fitting end to two of the most monstrous and bloodstained officials of a gruesome regime.
Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh were Supreme Court judges, notorious for their role in torturing and executing political prisoners and systemic human rights abuses. Both were involved in the notorious massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners, an atrocity carried out based on a fatwa by Iran’s then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei. The majority of those executed were members and supporters of the main democratic opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
Reviled internationally, Razini and Moghisehwere sanctioned by the EU, the UK, and the US for their roles in summary executions and other human rights abuses. International human rights organizations had long called for their indictment for crimes against humanity and for them to be held accountable for their involvement in atrocities. Razini, head of Branch 41 of the Supreme Court, was a well-known key enforcer in the theocratic regime’s ongoing campaign against dissidents. In the summer of 1988, simultaneous with the massacre of political prisoners, he was assigned by Khomeini to set up a "field court" disregarding any due process through which many PMOI/MEK supporters were summarily executed. Razini once sentenced dozens of university students to death in Bojnourd, in north-east Iran, after accusing them of ties to opposition groups. He boasted that the sentences were intended to “instil fear and crush opposition”.
As the lead deputy prosecutor at Gohardasht Prison, near Tehran, during the 1988 massacre, Mohammad Moghiseh personally took part in torturing detainees. Gohardasht Prison is widely known as one of Iran's harshest prisons because of its many reported cases of torture, rape and murder. Moghiseh insisted that not a single supporter of the MEK should be allowed to survive, as he sentenced thousands of political prisoners to death, including even those with disabilities like Nasser Mansouri, a paraplegic inmate, and Mohsen Mohammad Bagher, who was born paralyzed in both legs. There were harrowing accounts of the barbaric judge mocking prisoners before they were hanged.
In the early 1980s, Moghiseh began his career as an interrogator and torturer in Ward 3 of the notorious Evin Prison, Tehran, quickly building a reputation as a hardline enforcer. He was rewarded for his cruelty by being promoted to the presidency of Branch 28 of Iran’s Revolutionary Court, where he burnished his reputation for unjust and savage sentences. He was duly rewarded once again by being transferred to the Supreme Court in November 2020.
Last year, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, a BritishPakistani academic and Professor of Islamic and International Law at Brunel University, London, issued an explosive report describing the heinous crimes and gross violations of human rights in Iran, including in particular the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners. Describing the outrage as a crime against humanity, genocide and possibly a war crime, Javaid Rehman called for the perpetrators, many of whom hold senior positions in the Iranian hierarchy, to be held to account. Professor Rehman said: “Those who committed crimes against humanity in the 1980s and beyond must be held accountable, and impunity within the Islamic Republic of Iran must come to an end”.
Prof. Rehman’s report outlined in detail how the mass executions in 1988 were ordered by ‘Death Committees’ in jails across Iran. He reported how a tape recording of one of the Death Committee planning meetings had been made public by Ayatollah Khomeini’s nominated successor, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri. In the recording, Montazeri can be heard protesting that political prisoners, including women and even teenagers, were being hanged simply for supporting the PMOI/MEK opposition movement. Khomeini had instructed that the executions should be carried out in haste and that even pregnant women should not be spared. Because he had dared to complain, Montazeri was removed as Khomeini’s successor and detained under house arrest for the rest of his life. Montazeri’s son Ahmad, who released the top-secret tape recording, was also arrested, and sentenced to 6 years imprisonment.
Incredibly, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a member of one of the ‘Death Committees’, was until mid-2017 former President Hassan Rouhani’s Justice Minister! When his part in the murders became known publicly, it caused such outrage that he was replaced by Alireza Avaie, who was also a prominent ‘Death Committee’ executioner during the 1988 massacre, in his role as Chief Prosecutor in the city of Dezful. Ebrahim Raisi, dubbed the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ for his key role in the 1988 ‘Death Committees’ subsequently became President of Iran before his death in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
The two hanging-judges, Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghiseh, were integral parts of a network of criminal clerics at the heart of the fascist, theocratic regime. As the mullahs struggle to deal with a collapsing economy, spiralling inflation and soaring unemployment, they fear another nationwide uprising will sweep them from power. The decapitation of their long-term allies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, together with the fall of the brutal Assad regime in Syria, has left them in their weakest ever position since the 1979 revolution they hijacked to achieve power. The assassination of Razini and Moghiseh has brought the likelihood of insurrection one step closer. The arrival of their arch-enemy Donald Trump as American President may be the final nail in the fundamentalists' coffin.