An armed person is said to have entered the courthouse and gone on the attack, according to unverified reports from the Iranian judiciary's own news agency Mizan and other state-controlled media. The perpetrator is described as a "terrorist" and is said to have later taken their own life.
Another person is said to have been injured, according to Iranian sources. There are currently no independent reports of the incident.
At present, there is no official Iranian image of what the perpetrator in Tehran may have had as motives. Mizan writes that he was not part of any ongoing case at the court.
Accused criminals
The two victims, Ali Razini and Mohammad Moghisseh, are described as two "brave and revolutionary" judges.
Both have been identified by exile Iranian activist groups as long-standing key figures in the Iranian so-called revolutionary courts' oppression and punishment of dissidents – including large-scale executions.
Moghisseh, also known under the alias "Naserian", was the closest superior to Hamid Noury, who was convicted of gross human rights violations and murder in Sweden in the summer of 2022. They worked together at prisons in Tehran in the late 1980s, where it has been established that Noury was involved in extrajudicial executions of hundreds of people.
Hamid Noury was sentenced to life imprisonment in Sweden, but was allowed to return to Iran last summer in a highly publicized prisoner exchange.
Thousands executed
The other judge, Razini, is said to have been part of one of the so-called death committees that ordered the executions of hundreds of prisoners in Iranian prisons in 1988.
Human rights organizations estimate that up to 5,000 people were killed in mass executions in Iran in the summer of 1988.
Hamid Noury was convicted in 2022 by the Stockholm District Court to life imprisonment for his involvement in the executions of thousands of political prisoners in an Iranian prison in 1988. The Svea Court of Appeal upheld the verdict in December 2023.
Noury was lured to Sweden in 2019 and arrested at Arlanda. According to the indictment, he had selected prisoners who were to be brought before a committee that decided who would be executed, read out the names of those to be executed, and escorted them to the execution room. He is also said to have participated in the executions on one or more occasions.
The case was one of the largest of its kind in Sweden. Approximately 70 plaintiffs from different parts of the world were heard in connection with the trial.
In the summer of 2024, the Swedish government reached an agreement with Iran on an exchange. Hamid Noury was allowed to return to Iran, which in return released the imprisoned Swedish citizens Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi.
