The senior Shia cleric of Iran's Council of Experts has been shot dead
The senior Shia cleric of Iran's Council of Experts has been shot dead
In a state in the north of Iran, a powerful Council of Experts member who was also a top Islamic cleric was shot and killed.
A national news station said that Ayatollah Abbasali Soleimani died in the hospital after being shot at a bank in Babolsar, in the province of Mazandaran.
The Iranian news service IRNA said that the man who did the attack had been caught, but it was not clear what he was trying to do.
Ayatollah Soleimani is one of the 88 Shia leaders who make up the Council of Experts. This group chooses Iran's Supreme Leader and, in theory, can get rid of him.
Before that, he worked as a special assistant to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the province of Sistan-Baluchistan in the southeast of the country, which has a lot of problems. He left that job in 2019 after 17 years.
Ayatollah Soleimani, who is over 70 years old, is said to have been shot while sitting in an office of Bank Melli in Babolsar town on Wednesday morning.
A witness told Hawzahnews that a man took a bank security officer's gun and started shooting.
Also in April, an attack with knives on a Shia shrine northeast of Mashhad killed two priests and hurt a third.