The men who died that morning were not ordinary jurists. Ali Razini, born on May 23, 1953, had served in the Assembly of Experts from 2007 to 2016 and had survived a previous assassination attempt in 1998. Mohammad Moghiseh, born in 1956, had sat on the Supreme Court since 2020. Their judicial records placed them at the intersection of Iran's political and legal systems. Both had been connected to the 1988 mass executions of Iranian political prisoners, one of the darkest chapters in the Islamic Republic's history. Moghiseh had earned particular international notoriety. He was the sentencing judge in the case of Nasrin Sotoudeh, the human rights lawyer whose imprisonment drew global condemnation. He also adjudicated the case of artist Hossein Rajabian. In December 2019, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Moghiseh for engaging in censorship and actions that penalized Iranian citizens' exercise of free expression and assembly. The European Union and Canada imposed their own sanctions over alleged human rights abuses.

The attack unfolded in the Palace of Justice, the courthouse complex that houses Iran's Supreme Court in central Tehran. Asadi entered the building, where the judges were working in their separate branches — Razini in Branch 39, Moghiseh in Branch 53. The initial weapon was a knife, not a gun -- he only obtained the handgun by overpowering a bodyguard. After shooting both judges, he fled toward the third floor of the building, where he shot himself. The bodyguard survived. The judiciary's initial media statement insisted that the perpetrator had no prior cases before the Supreme Court and was not a visitor, framing the attack as something other than a disgruntled litigant's revenge. Asadi was a service worker, part of the building's daily functioning. Reports indicated that he had sought a salary increase and been denied. Whether workplace grievance was the full explanation or merely a surface motive remained unclear. Authorities detained several people who worked in the court building, and investigations continued.

President Masoud Pezeshkian condemned the killings as a terrorist and cowardly act, demanding swift follow-up by security forces. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a condolence message, referring to the dead judges as martyrs. The state-affiliated Tehran Times reported on the detentions that followed. For Iran's judiciary, the attack carried uncomfortable echoes. In 2005, judge Hassan Moghaddas had been assassinated -- a reminder that violence against judicial figures, while rare, was not unprecedented. The 2017 Tehran attacks and a 2023 assault on the Azerbaijani embassy demonstrated that the capital was not immune to spectacular violence, even within government buildings. Yet the Palace of Justice shooting was different in character. This was not an external assault by militants or a foreign-backed operation. It was an inside job carried out by someone who had been trusted to walk freely through the most sensitive corridors of the Iranian legal system for the better part of a decade.

The killing of Razini and Moghiseh laid bare the tensions embedded in Iran's judicial system. These were judges who had been adjudicating cases involving student protesters, artists, intellectuals, and activists in bench trials. Their roles in the 1988 executions connected them to events that remain deeply contested within Iranian society. Iran's legal system operates under Islamic law. The constitution's preamble specifies that jurists must operate with meticulous knowledge of Islamic laws, embedding religious authority into every aspect of judicial decision-making. Within this framework, judges like Moghiseh wielded enormous power over defendants who often had little recourse. The international sanctions against Moghiseh recognized what many Iranians already knew: the judiciary served not only as a legal institution but as an instrument of political control. That a service worker -- someone invisible within the hierarchy of power -- struck at that institution from within added a dimension that no official statement could fully explain.