By INU Staff
INU
- In Iran’s presidential elections, scheduled
to be held on May 19th, one of the many candidates is Ebrahim Raisi, currently
heading the economic giant Astan Quds Razavi that enjoys significant influence
over large swathes of Iran’s economy.
Raisi
was born in 1960 in the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran where he continued
his early education until 1975 when he transferred to the city of Qom to begin
his religious studies.
Following
the 1979 revolution in Iran he was appointed into government posts while
continuing his higher education. He is known to have taught religious studies
and from 1991 he participated in classes held by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei for 15 years.
Raisi
first began his work in the judiciary after 1979 when he joined a class in
Tehran of 70 other clerics seeking to work for the government. In the early
days Raisi accompanied the envoy of Iranian regime founder Ruhollah Khomeini to
the city of Masjed Suleiman in western Iran, from where he went on to be
appointed as a public prosecutor in Karaj, west of Tehran.
Two
years later, while maintaining his previous post, he was also appointed as the
public prosecutor in the city of Hamedan, western Iran. In 1984 he was
transferred to Tehran and appointed as the capital’s deputy public prosecutor.
Years
later, after gaining Khomeini’s personal attention, he was appointed as a
member of the “Death Commission” tasked to supervise the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoner.
Following
Khomeini’s death, Ebrahim Raisi was appointed as Tehran’s public prosecutor
where he served the regime for five years until 1994. From there on he assumed
the position of the regime’s general inspector until 2004, and moved on to
serve as the judiciary’s first deputy until 2014. Continuing his climb up the
regime’s ranks, he was appointed also as the prosecutor in the regime’s Special
Clerics Court and went on to become Iran’s chief public prosecutor in 2014.
Following
the death of Abbas Vaez-Tabasi, on March 7th, 2016 Khamenei appointed Raisi as
head of the Astan Quds Razavi economic hub.
Ebrahim Raisi’s Role in “Death Commission” and 1988 massacre
In
1988, Khomeini’s deputy Ayatollah Montazeri described Raisi (then Tehran’s
deputy public prosecutor) along with Morteza Eshraghi (a judge in Tehran’s Evin
Prison), Hossein Ali Nayeri (Tehran’s public prosecutor) and Mostafa Pour
Mohammadi (then representative of the Ministry of Intelligence and now Iran’s
Minister of Justice) as perpetrators in “the execution of political prisoners
in (summer of 1988)”.
The
names of the first two individuals have been stated in Khomeini’s fatwa
ordering the purge.To this day Resii has refused to make any public comments in
this regard.
Over 30,000 political prisoners, mainly
members and supporters of the Iranian opposition People's Mojahedin Organization
of Iran (PMOI/MEK)
were executed in a span of a mere few months.
Other managing and political posts
Khomeini
was known to mission Raisi to a variety of different special judiciary missions
across the country. Ebrahim Raisi was also appointed by Khamenei as a member of
board of clerics in the "Setad Ejraiye
Farmane Hazrate Emam" – Headquarters for Executing
the Order of the Imam, supervising the supreme leader’s assets.
He
also served as the Iranian regime’s first secretariat of the so-called
“Headquarters of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” a body that
is associated with human rights and civil liberties abuses.
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