Monitoring desk
ISLAMABAD/DUBAI: As a young prosecutor in Tehran, Ebrahim Raisi, the current Iranian president, sat on a “death committee” overseeing the execution of hundreds of political prisoners in Tehran.
Raisi also served in several positions in Iran’s judicial system, including as Deputy Chief Justice from 2004 to 2014, Attorney General from 2014 to 2016, and Chief Justice from 2019 to 2021.
Raisi was also the Prosecutor and Deputy Prosecutor of Tehran in the 1980s and 1990s. He was Custodian and Chairman of Astan Quds Razavi from 2016 to 2019.
Now president three decades later and seen by many as Iran’s potential next supreme leader, Raisi is presiding over the uncompromising response to domestic and global challenges which have seen Iran courts pass dozens of death sentences.
Death committee
Four people have been executed after being convicted on charges of widespread unrests that erupted in September over the death in moral police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman. On Saturday, Iran executed Tehran’s former deputy defense minister Alireza Akbari on spying charges.
The recent executions have triggered condemnation from the West and the United States, but Raisi has insisted that “identification, punishment and trial” of all those who authorities believed were involved in violence would continue.
“The executions aimed at creating a republic of fear in which the citizens don’t dare to protest and the officials don’t dare to defect,” said Ali Vaez, the global Crisis Group think-tank’s Iran Project Director.
