One Shiite Cleric Dead, Two Wounded In Iran Stabbing Attack
Maryam Sinaiee
Iran International
In a rare incident Tuesday, a man said to be a foreigner, stabbed three clerics in Iran's largest Shiite shrine in Mashhad, killing one of them instantly.
Iran International
In a rare incident Tuesday, a man said to be a foreigner, stabbed three clerics in Iran's largest Shiite shrine in Mashhad, killing one of them instantly.
The incident happened during the third day of the holy month of Ramadan at the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth imam of Shiites, in the north-eastern city of Mashhad in Khorasan- Razavi Province despite the usual heavy security measures taken at the shrine.
Mahmoud Arefi, homicide prosecutor of Mashhad Public and Revolutionary Court, said Tuesday evening that two clerics wounded by the assailant were being treated at hospital and were in stable conditions. Iran's official and semi-official news agencies said the three clerics were seminary students and active volunteers in the slum areas of the city.
The official news agency IRNA posted a video of police arresting the assailant. Videos posted on social media show the victim, named as Mohammad Aslani, with the clerical rank of Hojjat ol-Eslam, in a pool of blood on the marble courtyard of the shrine after the stabbing.
Public and Revolutionary Prosecutor of Mashhad, Mohammad-Hossein Darrudi, said hours after the incident that five men were arrested in connection with the stabbing including the assailant and four suspected of collaborating with him.
Darrudi said the assailant was a "foreign national" and that further information would be announced after completion of the investigation. Iranian officials often refer to Afghan refugees and economic migrants living in Iran as "foreign nationals".
The political, social, and security deputy of Khorasan-Razavi Governor's Office, Hadi Tabatabaei, told Fars news agency that officials were meeting at the Governor's Office regarding Tuesday's stabbing and "various aspects of the incident" were being investigated.
The assailant's motive for the attack on the Shiite clerics in Mashhad is not clear. Some people on social media say they suspect a connection with the shooting of two Sunni clerics at a mosque in Gonbad Kavus, northernIran, two days earlier.
Some government supporters on social media have called the incident a terrorist attack by[Sunni] Wahhabis. Authorities have offered no explanation. They claim the attack was meant to cause strife between Iran's majority Shiites and Sunnis who constitute around 10 percent of the population.
An informed source speaking on condition of anonymity told Fars news agency that the assailant lived in the same Mashhad neighborhood as those he attacked. He also said that people in the neighborhood say the assailant had mental health issues and held personal grudges against the victims. However, this does not fit the theory that five other people helped the attacker.
Hostility towards clerics has been on the rise in Iran. In January a well-known cleric, Mohammadreza Zaeri, who often appears on state-controlled television programs, said people had a level of hatred and grudge against clerics that was creating a social crisis.
Zaeri said taxi drivers refused to pick him up and that he had been spat on and sworn at a few times recently. Another cleric, the reformist Mohammad-Taghi Fazel-Meybodi, also said in January that clerics and seminary students were avoiding their usual garb for fear of being insulted in public.
In late December, it was reported that a woman had been arrested at an earlier date in the religious city of Qom, after swearing at a cleric and trampling on his turban because he had hit her on the head with his cane for not complying with hijab rules.
Many Iranians see the clergy as responsible for their economic hardship and lack of social freedoms.
With hardliners loyal to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei occupying key government institutions by manipulating elections, most reformist and non-partisan observers have given up hope for steering the Islamic Republic toward democracy.
In an interview with the moderate Rouydad24 news website in Tehran, Moqaddari said the government's security approach to politics has led to political disillusionment for even loyal reformist politicians and led them to inaction and despair. There is no hope in a miracle in Iran, he said.
He added that there are two types of reformists in Iran: One group that is committed to values such as freedom, human rights and equality and is working to establish good governance through a transition to democracy, and another group that takes advantage of the idea of reformism as a brand only to be get a share in the country's political dynamics.
The first group has been pushed out of the country's political landscape by the totalitarian hard core of the regime and they are no longer capable of confronting those who have made elections meaningless and eliminated the republican nature of the government.The other group is happy to take part in the non-competitive elections in a minimal way, Moqaddari explained.
He added that the situation should be alarming for the regime as well as for Iran's political community and civil society. The immigration of Iranian political activists and academic elites is a result of this reality.
Asked why Iranians no longer welcome the idea of reformism, Moqaddari said that the disillusionment and despair is not about reformism. The people are annoyed by the entire political system as their non-participation in recent elections have shown.
A recent online opinion poll by a Netherlands-based institute found that over 60 percent of Iranians want regime change or "transition from the Islamic Republic".
Meanwhile, in an interview with Didban Iran website, Tehran university academic, Amanollah Gharaee Moghaddam, said that widespread corruption among Iranian statesmen have led Iranians not to trust the government and its officials.
The academic also said that a society in which everything is overshadowed by ideology will not develop.
"Iran has many experts and many factories and natural resources and has imported the technology it needs. Yet the country cannot develop. Because the people do not trust the government and its officials. It is every man for himself," he said. With widespread corruption in the state apparatus, even reaching lawmakers, the people cannot trust in anything having to do with the government.
He added that public distrust is all down to corruption, bribery and embezzlement. “So, even brothers do not trust each other let alone trust between the people and their employers."
Parallel with corruption, Gharaee cautiously also brought up the authoritarian nature of the government, that treats people as subjects rather than citizens.
He argued that a society overwhelmed by ideology and devoid of pluralism cannot grow and develop. "There will be no progress In a system where everything is dictated from the top and statemen are used to issuing orders without seeking the public's views, or in a system where reporters are put in jail."
Gharaee warned that "If the current situation continues, Iran will face a major political threat. The rulers should change this situation because otherwise, the political system and everything else will collapse."
In an interview with Bazaar website on Monday, Mehdi Dadar, secretary of car importers' association, said buyers in the Iranian market are critical of a ban on importing cars behind which, he alleged, lies a 'mafia group', as authorities do nothing to correct the situation.
Dadar accused policymakers of indirectly supporting Chinese auto parts manufacturers and turning the industry into "assemblers of Chinese parts". He alleged that powerful importers of car parts are behind government opposition to importing cars.
Iran's quasi-government automotive industry, the county’s largest after oil and gas, employs 700,000 workers. Iran annually makes nearly 1.5 million vehicles. The sector is in debt for billions of dollars and is a large burden for the government and its banks.
The issue of the ban on car imports introduced in 2018 became very controversial last week when lawmakers realized that their approval for the government to provide foreign currency to importers for 70,000 cars had been eliminated from the budget from the budget.
During their debate over the budget earlier, lawmakers had agreed to the government's plan to allow importing 70,000 cars in the next 12 months to augment tax revenues. The budget bill, however, set a condition that the cost of the imported cars would not exceed 25,000 per unit.
According to the official news agency IRNA, the omission was made with the knowledge of the parliament's presidium and Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf because they knew the constitutional watchdog, the Expediency Council would oppose it.
Critics, however, say that the Expediency Council and another watchdog, the Guardian Council, should not have intervened in a practical matter, and allege outside influences played a role in the interference.
Minister of industries, mines, and trade, Reza Fatemi-Amin, on March 13 claimed that the ban on car imports was a consequence of shortage of foreign currency rather than a measure to support domestic producers and the ban would be lifted soon.
Iran Khodro and Saipa, the two largest automakers, have a monopoly in the Iranian market.
Critics say by protecting automakers' interests in many ways, including by eliminating foreign competitors, successive Iranian administrations have become complicit in putting innocent people's lives in danger.
Road Police officials have repeatedly warned about inadequate safety standards of domestic cars. Speaking to the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) in October, Deputy Chief of Iran's traffic police, Brigadier-General Taymour Hosseini said road accidents were occurring due to inadequate safety standards as Iranian companies struggled to keep up with cost and parts sourcing. "Big companies in the world are working on intelligent cars but we have dropped our expectations so much that we are happy with having anti-lock braking systems,” he said.
In an interview on March 24 with Hamshahri Online, chief of Iran's road and traffic police, Brigadier General Kamal Hadianfar, criticized manufacturers for importing car parts from China, saying there is no effective quality control in the industry.
After two massive vehicle collisions involving tens of cars in southwestern Iran in January during which the cars' airbags failed to open, Hadianfar called domestically produced cars "carriages of death".