Benefit who?
Even if IAEA, US intelligence under Tulsa gabbard already said Iran not planning to build a bomb, they are still attacked. So better build a bomb.
Benefits the iranian pap to end the tyranny of the current regime..
Double murder in Tehran exposes growing anger over Iran’s brutal judiciary
July 18, 2025 4:00 am CET
Many of the closest allies of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have met violent deaths in the past months.
While international observers have focused on Israel’s assassinations of Tehran’s top commanders and nuclear scientists in airstrikes in June, the murders of two — or possibly three — prominent judges early this year have attracted much less attention, even though they lay bare a significant swell of popular discontent in the Islamic Republic.
On Jan. 18, Farshad Assadi, a junior employee in Tehran’s vast neoclassical Palace of Justice, described in some accounts as a “tea server,” shot dead two senior judges: Mohammad Moghiseh and Ali Razini, both of them high-ranking Shia clerics.
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A third judge, Hossein-Ali Nayeri, died on April 3. The judiciary said he succumbed to underlying health issues, but initial accounts of the Jan. 18 attack had pointed to Nayeri as a third target.
Speculation over Assadi’s motives ranged from theories that he was a politically active kitchen-worker through to suggestions he was simply furious over his salary. It is unlikely we will ever know, as he killed himself before he could be arrested.
Whatever his reasons, it was a killing that immediately exposed a fundamental fault line.
A nation divided
For many Iranians, the country’s often coarse and brutal judiciary has come to epitomize the rot at the the heart of the ruling system, while Iran’s leadership has to defend the judges for holding the fabric of the Islamic Republic together.
While the head of the Supreme Court Mohammad Jafar Montazeri described the deaths of the two judges as the “price the establishment pays for its survival,” many Iranians on social media such as Instagram and X rushed to praise Assadi under the Persian hashtag of “heroic tea attendant.”
There was no question about the importance of Moghiseh and Razini to the clerical elite. Khamenei himself presided over their funeral — delivering a eulogy over their caskets, which were wrapped in the Iranian flag, with white turbans placed on top.
A coffin containing the body Mohammad Moghiseh is carried out of the Iranian judiciary headquarters in Tehran on January 20. | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“O God, if they were benefactors, multiply their benevolence, and if they were sinners, please forgive them. O God, we know nothing about them except for good deeds,” Khamenei whispered, flanked by two bodyguards.
Other Iranians, however, quickly came forward with very different recollections of those so-called “good deeds,” excoriating the unprofessionalism of a vulgar, often poorly educated judicial class that issues arbitrary rulings.
Insults and harsh sentences
Atena Daemi, a civil rights activist was tried in a 15-minute hearing convened by Moghiseh in April 2015. In an Instagram post in January, she reflected on his draconian dispensation of justice. After Moghiseh issued her a 14-year prison sentence and slammed her opposition to the death penalty as inadmissible, he branded her a “prostitute.”
“God willing, someone will kill your father, and then we’ll see what you’ll do. Will you sentence the murderer or not?” the seminarian fulminated. Daemi fled Iran in May 2023 and eventually flew to Toronto.
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In addition to their role in a mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, the three judges also presided over high-profile trials of dissidents.
Moghiseh sentenced the human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh to seven years in prison in 2018. Often referred to as Iran’s Nelson Mandela, Sotoudeh has spent a significant portion of her adult life behind bars, and is the recipient of the European Parliament’s 2012 Sakharov Prize.
Razini adjudicated the case of dissident journalist and theologian Hassan Yousefi Eshkavari whose participation in a conference in 2000 hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin had infuriated the Iranian government. In a first hearing, Eshkavari was sentenced to death for making “paganistic” statements, such as arguing that hijab dress codes cannot be compulsory. In a retrial in 2002, Razini handed him a seven-year prison term.
Protestors stand on an image of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy in London. | Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images
A defector from the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization opposition — previously listed as a terror group by the U.S. and EU — told Deutsche Welle Persian in a 2020 interview he remembered Moghiseh instructing prison staff to hand out pastries after each execution was carried out in the summer of 1988. Journalists and students who were put on trial following the 2009 pro-democracy Green Movement, have also shared anecdotes of being verbally abused by the judges.
It is little surprise, then, that many Iranians reacted viscerally to the judges’ deaths. One day after the twin assassinations, an Iranian X user named “ThatsEnough” wrote: “I must say precisely that I hate whoever is not happy with the elimination of Moghiseh.” In a January 26 post, another X user, identifying as “the girl on the sixth floor,” echoed the sentiments of a larger cohort of Iranians. “We rejoice at the death of any judge who becomes the killing machine of the Islamic Republic,” she wrote.
Political capture
Some participants in the debate promptly called for sober heads, arguing that any glorification of violence contradicted the very principles that Iranian human rights’ campaigners have been espousing. All in all, though, the popular reaction showed that frustration with the failings of the judiciary is a core component of broader discontent with the regime.
It is no coincidence that the Iranian film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” winner of the 2024 Prix Spécial in Cannes, is centered around the story of a flawed investigative judge as a paradigm of the national malaise. The figurative title of the film derives from a species of tree — a metaphor for the governing system — that ultimately strangles its host, in this case the Iranian people.
In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2024, Iran ranked 151 in a listing of 180 countries assessed for public views on the reliability of governance and law enforcement in each jurisdiction.
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Atieh Babakhani, an assistant professor of law and society at Ramapo College of New Jersey, said the essential problem was that Iran’s judiciary was not politically independent.
“I think the broader issue here is that these actions clearly violate the law, including Article 39 of the Constitution, which explicitly states that violating the dignity and honor of anyone who has been legally detained, imprisoned, or exiled is prohibited under any circumstance,” she said.
“These individuals are part of the system, and they know that as long as they protect the interests of the state, they’re unlikely to face any consequences,” she added.
Arbitrary rulings
The arbitrariness of judicial authorities has been very much on display in the way the judges have approached dual nationals and journalists arrested for the purposes of hostage diplomacy or intimidation.
During the turmoil that followed the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, several foreign correspondents and academics were detained.
Iason Athanasiadis, a Greek-British journalist was arrested as he was about to board a flight to Istanbul. He was released 20 days later under mounting international pressure, but the charges leveled against him were never made public.
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Athanasiadis said he believed his arrest was motivated by Iranian officials seeking “to create an information operation to convince their citizens that what was happening on the street was not just indignation and outrage at perceived election irregularities, but in fact an organized plan involving foreign powers and their agents on the ground.”
Ana Diamond, an author and Oxford University scholar, was imprisoned in Tehran between 2014 and 2018, and her plight has been cited in United Nations proceedings.
The senior prosecutor in Diamond’s case was Ebrahim Raisi, the late president of Iran who hailed from the judicial branch.
“He would nod along as I spoke, giving the impression of listening, but never once met my eyes,” Diamond said of her experience of twice being cross-examined by Raisi. “That absence of acknowledgment, in a conversation about my possible death or lifelong imprisonment, really stripped me of dignity.”
Portraits of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during a religious procession in Karachi. | Asif Hassan/AFP via Getty Images
Diamond said Raisi didn’t address her directly. “But once he spoke, his power became chillingly clear. It reminded me of the stylized cruelty of Soviet-era show trials where the outcome was predetermined,” she said.
As confirmed by Diamond and others, Iran’s judiciary secures its convictions through a full gamut of tricks and strongarm tactics, ranging from extended interrogations in solitary confinement to defendants being compelled to sign documents that they are not allowed to review properly.
“I was held in solitary confinement for months without my family being told where I was, and vice versa. I was repeatedly threatened with death, starvation, forced medication, and subjected to invasive and degrading procedures like a virginity test,” she said, lamenting that such practices were often bundled up in “Islamic moralism,” and delivered with “a tone of sanctity.”
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Milad Poureisa, a student activist currently in exile, was one of several people arrested in front of the presidential office for protesting against a series of brutal assaults on political prisoners in Evin Prison in 2014 that has come to be known as Black Thursday.
The judiciary didn’t allow an investigation, even though the head of the Prisons’ Organization Gholam-Hossein Esmaili was removed. He was offered a promotion and later became the chief of staff to President Raisi. In a summary trial conducted by Judge Abolghassem Salavati, Poureisa was sentenced to six years and three months in prison. He wasn’t given the chance to appeal.
“The court of appeals is premised on the idea that a session isn’t mandatory and isn’t supposed to be held to begin with, and we only showed up to receive our sentences,” he said.
There was no question about the importance of Moghiseh and Razini to the clerical elite. | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Everything was sewn up in advance.
“Even in the primary court session, I didn’t have the chance to present a defense argument. I only appeared to rewrite a copy of the verdict that had been prepared.”
It’s a way of doing business that explains why so many furious Iranians were willing to praise the “heroic tea attendant.”
Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist based in the United States.
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