Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has earned a new name among Iranian social media users: “burial blogger.”
One by one, men close to the ayatollah are ending up in early graves, with Khamenei leading their burial prayers or at least holding state ceremonies for them (and posting photos or notices of the ceremonies on social media). His terror mastermind, Qasem Soleimani, was killed by a drone strike ordered by US President Donald Trump in 2020. Khamenei’s favorite “footman,” President Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash last May. And last year, Israel took out Khamenei’s Axis of Resistance lieutenants, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.
The supreme leader buried two more on January 19. A day earlier, senior judges Mohammad Moghiseh and Ali Razini were shot dead in broad daylight at the Palace of Justice in Tehran. The assailant is yet to be identified but has been described by Iranian officials as a “janitor” who had “infiltrated” the judiciary. He killed himself while attempting to escape.
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Many Iranians rejoiced hearing the news, since the two judges were infamous for handing down death, imprisonment, and lashing sentences to dissidents, journalists, and activists. Over decades, activists and former political prisoners have brought attention to the judges’ involvement in human rights violations and have named the judges as playing a role in the mass executions of the 1980s when thousands of dissidents were summarily executed and their bodies were dumped in mass graves.
The Persian hashtag “hero janitor” went viral, and former political prisoners told of their encounters with the two judges. For example, stories about Moghiseh, who was sanctioned by the United States in 2019 for rights violations, showed his tendency for cruelty and prejudice and how he threatened people with torture. One journalist recounted how Moghiseh, while judging his case, had told him, “We should fill your mouth with gunpowder and explode your head.” Another journalist noted how Moghiseh had said to people arrested during protests, “We should set you all on fire in city squares.” Despite this background, Iran’s so-called “reformist” President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a condolence message about the deaths and vowed the continuation of the judges’ “glorious path”—a path drenched in blood.
From the narratives emerging out of Tehran about the killing of the two judges, one thing is clear: The ayatollah is losing his grip on power. Khamenei’s lieutenants are falling like leaves in autumn. And despite the state having absolute control over broadcast media and stringently censoring print and online spaces, the regime is no longer capable of controlling narratives about anything. The public’s recurring jubilation over the death of senior regime officials signals irreconcilable rage directed at the clerical establishment.
The state’s attempt to steer the narrative
In the first hours after the incident, authorities (including ones representing the Foreign Ministry) labeled the killings “acts of terror,” with the Judiciary’s own news agency, Mizan, reporting that an “armed infiltrator assassinated the two judges in a premeditated manner.”
The first statement from the Judiciary broadly blamed the usual suspects, saying that the killings might have been in retaliation for “extensive measures taken by the judiciary against elements affiliated with the cursed Zionist regime, American agents and spies, and terrorist groups.”
The head of the Judiciary Protection and Intelligence Center, which is responsible for protecting Judiciary personnel, echoed the same allegations. Former Judge Hojatoleslam Ali Abdallahi called the assailant a “terrorist” and blamed the “enemy” for the incident without elaborating.
The commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Major General Hossein Salami, called the incident the “glorious martyrdom of two honorable judges” in a “terrorist crime” that is a “sign of the hatred and anger of the counterrevolutionaries and the sworn enemies of the Islamic homeland.”
Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, the state started blaming the exiled, cult-like opposition group Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MeK). Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a veteran security and judicial figure, appeared on state TV to talk about the killings, saying that the “MeK certainly had a hand in the terrorist killings.” He alleged that the two judges were killed in a “targeted assassination.” As for proof, he claimed that the assailant had been “questioning around who deals with security cases and cases of MeK members.” Pourmohammadi also said that the assailant planned to kill a third person, an Islamic Revolutionary Court judge, who was not on the premises on the day of the incident. He also alleged that during the shooting, the assailant had “said something about the MeK to a judge he failed to kill,” adding that “It’s not clear if he chanted slogans or what. All these indicate that he was acting in a targeted manner and carrying out an operation. It is not clear if from outside, [MeK] had given him a clear assignment or had told him to assassinate judges with the Islamic Revolutionary Court that deal with [security] cases.”
News outlets reporting on Iran’s accusations regarding these killings have noted that the 1980s mass executions, in which Moghiseh and Razini were allegedly involved, targeted the MeK among other opposition groups.
Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir has doubled down on this narrative. He said last month that “multiple people have been identified and arrested in relation to this case . . . among them at least three were agents of opposition groups . . . It appears that the [assailant] was in contact with opposition groups and the MeK.”
Judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i days later took the rhetoric up a notch. He described the killings as “part of the extensive plans of the enemy for disrupting security. They implement hundreds of similar plans, but they are quashed.” In the jargon of Islamic Republic officials, “enemy” is often used to refer to the United States and its allies—and the regime claims opposition groups are controlled and directed by the “enemy.”
Senior intel officer has a different story
On January 25, 2025, an Iranian intelligence agent and senior MeK case officer, Naser Razavi, significantly diverged from the state narrative. In the past, Razavi’s book on the MeK was promoted by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, with the agency introducing him as a former senior intelligence officer with the Intelligence Ministry and the IRGC who “has dedicated 30 years of his service to working on the MeK file.”
In his recent interview, Razavi told the reformist Ensaf News that the Iranian intelligence agencies have “concluded that this incident and the assailant had nothing to do with the Monafeghin Organization,” a derogatory term used by Islamic Republic officials to refer to the MeK. However, he said that in “such cases,” the intelligence community faces “a lot of pressure to assign responsibility to the MeK since that would be seen as an achievement for the victims.”
A core ideological pillar of the Islamic Republic is celebrating “martyrdom,” when one is killed while defending the state, which regime leaders see as the embodiment of Allah itself. Case in point, as is customary in official communications in Iran, the supreme leader issued a message to the judges’ families, extending both his “congratulations and condolences” for the judges’ “martyrdom.”
Razavi said that the assailant was “depressed since he had been demoted” and “his salary had been cut. His anger was caused by this.” He argued that “The killing was not politically motivated. However, it is not clear if he had a personal grudge against Moghiseh and Razini or his anger was directed against the entirety of the [Supreme Court] and targeted senior members of the [state] entity.”
He also noted that this was not the first time that Razini was targeted. In 1999, Razini survived an attempt on his life that an Iranian general blamed on the Mahdaviat Group, an Islamist cult that professes to be preparing the world for the arrival of Shia Islam’s twelfth imam, Mahdi. At the time, Razavi was in charge of the investigation. When he informed Razini that the intelligence community had concluded that the MeK was not behind the attack, “he got outraged and told me I was talking nonsense,” Razavi said.
According to Razavi, over the years, Iranian senior officials have pressured the security agencies to unfoundedly blame incidents on the MeK, to either cover up personal grudges and murders or to promote their own public profile.
Reacting to the state blaming the MeK for the killing of the two judges, Razavi said, “What else can they say? When they blame the incident on the ‘enemy,’ they are left with no choice but to name the ‘enemy’ as well, and they name the MeK.”
A few hours after the interview was published, the Iranian Judiciary released a statement saying that comments made by Razavi were “his personal views, are far from reality, and have nothing to do with the judicial investigation into the case.” The Judiciary also announced that since Razavi’s comments had included “multiple false claims,” a legal case has been opened against him. Reacting to the statement, Razavi stood by his comments and again rejected reports linking the assailant to the MeK.
The bigger picture
Incidents such as the recent killing and the conflicting narratives coming out of Iran are another tear in the veil, and they reveal that the Islamic Republic is in shambles.
Consider the fact that, while terror leaders had found Iran to be one of their very few safe havens over the past decade, Haniyeh’s targeted killing and this recent incident indicate that the ayatollah can’t even protect his pawns in safe houses and judiciary buildings in Tehran.
The ayatollah himself appears to not be immune to the rising fear felt by his men. During Haniyeh’s funeral in Tehran, he kept eyeing the sky, and speculation spread that he was looking upward fearing a drone strike. Burying the two judges, he appeared bulkier than usual, sparking speculation that he was wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his clothes.
Another sign of Khamenei losing his grip on power is that his frustration about being strategically cornered has seeped into his public speeches. Speaking about the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the frustrated ayatollah bemoaned that he was “prepared to send aid but land and air was blocked.”
The Islamic Republic—an authoritarian state that has kept its grip on power by maintaining perpetual war—now finds itself unpopular at home, fending off imagined and real foreign adversaries, and paranoid about infiltration. Power is slipping through the hands of the clerical establishment like sand. And Tehran’s ayatollah doesn’t need to look farther than Syria to see how fast he can end up deposed.
Khosro Sayeh Isfahani is a researcher with the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs.
Further reading
Image: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prays over the bodies of two assassinated Supreme Court Judges, Mohammad Moghiseh and Ali Razini in Tehran, Iran, January 19, 2025. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS – THIS PICTURE WAS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY.