November 29, 2024
The Friday prayer leader of Kazeroun was shot dead by an assassin shortly after completing congregational prayers October 25. He is the third Friday prayer leader in the city to be murdered since the revolution.
Mohammad Sabahi “was targeted by someone with a firearm,” Kazeroun Governor Mohammad Ali Bekhrad told state television. Kazeroun is in Fars province. The assassin turned the firearm on himself after shooting Sabahi and committed suicide before offering a motive for the shooting.
However, the governor said, “There is a possibility of personal hostility in this incident.” Sabahi’s predecessor, Mohammad Khorsand, was fatally stabbed outside his home in 2019. And in 1981, AbdolRahim Daneshju, the Friday prayer leader at that time, was shot dead after evening prayers by killers said to be members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
Murders of clerics are not uncommon in Iran. In April of last year, Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani was killed in a bank branch in Babolsar in the northern province of Mazandaran. A bank security guard was later sentenced to death for the killing.
