{"id":111241,"date":"2023-06-15T07:47:30","date_gmt":"2023-06-15T12:47:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/?p=111241"},"modified":"2023-06-15T07:47:30","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T12:47:30","slug":"iran-sentences-man-to-death-for-killing-an-ayatollah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/2023\/06\/15\/iran-sentences-man-to-death-for-killing-an-ayatollah\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran Sentences Man to Death for Killing an Ayatollah"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"VOA \u2014 TEHRAN \u2014 <\/span>An Iranian court has sentenced a man to death after convicting him of killing a powerful cleric in April, the judiciary said Wednesday, but the victim’s family may still spare his life.<\/p>\n

Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani, a member of the Assembly of Experts that selects the country’s supreme leader, was killed on April 26 inside a bank in Babolsar city in the northern province of Mazandaran.<\/p>\n

The man convicted of his murder, who has not been named by authorities, was a security guard at the bank.<\/p>\n

“The killer of Ayatollah Soleimani was sentenced to qesas [Iran’s Islamic law of retribution] on the charge of intentional murder,” provincial judiciary chief Mohammad Sadegh Akbari said, according to the judiciary’s Mizan Online website.<\/p>\n

CCTV footage released by the media at the time showed the security guard, wearing a blue and white jacket, shooting the cleric from behind as he was sitting in a chair at the bank.<\/p>\n

Under Islamic law, the sentence of qesas can be dropped if the victim’s family agrees to spare the convict.<\/p>\n

Soleimani, 75, was previously a representative of the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.<\/p>\n

He had also been the imam who led Friday prayers in the cities of Kashan, in Isfahan province, and Zahedan, in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.<\/p>\n

Under the constitution, the 88-strong Assembly of Experts is tasked with supervising, dismissing and electing the supreme leader.<\/p>\n

In April 2022, a suspected jihadist knife attack in Iran’s second city of Mashhad led to the deaths of two clerics and injuries to a third.<\/p>\n

The chief suspect, identified as Abdolatif Moradi, 21, was hanged in Mashhad in June on the charge of moharebeh, or enmity against God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VOA \u2014 TEHRAN \u2014 An Iranian court has sentenced a man to death after convicting him of killing a powerful cleric in April, the judiciary said Wednesday, but the victim’s family may still spare his life. Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani, a member of the Assembly of Experts that selects the country’s supreme leader, was killed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111242,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111244,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111241\/revisions\/111244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}