April
26, 2023
A
powerful high-ranking Iranian cleric was gunned down Wednesday in a bank in
northern Mazandaran province, according to Iranian news reports.
The
clerk, Ayatollah Abbasali Soleimani, was confirmed dead by Ruhollah Solgi,
deputy governor of Mazandaran province, Iran's official Islamic Republic News
Agency reported.
Surveillance
video of the shooting circulating online shows Soleimani, who is in his
mid-to-late 70s, sitting in a chair at a Babolsar city bank when a security
guard comes up behind him with a gun and opens fire.
The
clerk drops 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 when two men
wrest the weapon from his hands.
Mazandaran
Gov. Mahmoud Hosseinipour on Wednesday evening told IRNA that the gunman worked
for a security company hired by the bank and that his actions were not
terrorism-related.
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 armed by the Constitution with the power to appoint, monitor
and dismiss the country's supreme leader, according to Washington, D.C.-based
nonprofit the Brookings Institute.
Though
the motive behind the assassination was unclear as of late Wednesday, the
shooting comes amid the women-led anti-regime protests that began in September
after a 22-year-old woman was killed in police custody following her arrest for
violating Iran's draconian hijab laws.
Amid
the demonstrations, clerics have become a target of protesters who have knocked
their turbans off in the streets.
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