Iran’s former judiciary chief Mohammad Yazdi dies at 89

Iran’s former judiciary chief Mohammad Yazdi, an ultra-conservative, died on Wednesday aged 89, the official IRNA state news agency reports.

A student of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ruhollah Khomeini, Yazdi died due to “illnesses of the digestive system,” IRNA says.

He had been named head of Iran’s judicial authority in 1989, a little after the country’s current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, took the helm.

Iran’s former judiciary chief Mohammad Yazdi attends a session of the Assembly of Experts in the capital Tehran on March 10, 2015, before being appointed as the new head of the Assembly. (Behrouz Mehri/AFP)

Yazdi headed the judiciary for a decade, before he was replaced in the wake of student protests in the summer of 1999.

Reformist media had demanded his departure, criticizing a series of trials against individuals close to then-president Mohammad Khatami that it decried as politically motivated.

A longstanding member of the Assembly of Experts — a body tasked with appointing the supreme leader — Yazdi served as its president in 2015.

— AFP