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
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