Mohammad Beheshti

Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti was widely considered the second most powerful figure in Iran after Ruhollah Khomeini during the early years of the Islamic Republic. A cleric trained in Qom and holder of a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Tehran, he served as head of the Islamic Centre Hamburg from 1965 to 1970, where he built networks among Iranian students in Europe and published multilingual Islamic journals.

After the Iranian Revolution, Beheshti became a member and then chairman of the Islamic Revolutionary Council. He served as vice-chairman of the Assembly of Experts for the Constitution, where he was the principal architect of the new constitution, embedding the doctrine of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist) into Iran's governmental framework.

Beheshti co-founded the Islamic Republican Party alongside Ali Khamenei, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad-Javad Bahonar, and others, and served as its secretary-general. He was appointed the first head of the Judiciary of Iran in 1979. He was also a co-founder of the Haghani Seminary in Qom in the 1960s, alongside Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi and Ahmad Jannati.

Beheshti led the clerical establishment's campaign against President Abolhassan Banisadr, whose impeachment in June 1981 he orchestrated through the IRP's parliamentary majority. On 28 June 1981, Beheshti was assassinated along with more than 70 other officials in the Hafte Tir bombing at IRP headquarters, an attack attributed to the Mojahedin-e Khalq.