Top Iranian clerics who are close to the supreme leader have increasingly been testing positive for Covid-19, and one senior cleric has just died from it. Multiple regional news outlets have reported the death Ayatollah Hashem Bathaei-Golpaygani Monay after he tested positive for coronavirus over the weekend, in the very first instance of a member of the powerful Council of Experts diagnosed with the virus.
The Council of Experts is the top clerical-government advisory body that chooses the country’s supreme leader when the former dies or steps down.
It’s but the latest instance of the deadly virus appearing to come closer and closer to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader of the Islamic Republic.
The 79-year old Bathaei-Golpaygani had been rushed to a hospital the city of Qom on Saturday. Mehr News Agency reported that he passed away Monday morning in the ICU.
Starting weeks ago top Iranian officials began catching the virus, and a top former ambassador to Egypt and the Vatican also died from it, as it’s also increasingly penetrated the top ranks of the country’s elderly powerful clerical establishment.
For example, 71-year-old cleric Mohammad Mirmohammadi died of the virus early this month. He was a member of the Expediency Discernment Council – also an important advisory body to the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Meanwhile hard-hit Iran’s death toll has jumped overnight once again. Al Jazeera reports based on Iranian state sources:
Iran state TV says new coronavirus has killed another 129 people, pushing the death toll to 853 amid 14,991 confirmed cases.
“Our plea is that everyone take this virus seriously and in no way attempt to travel to any province,” health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said in a televised news conference.
“In the past 24 hours we had 1,053 confirmed new cases of coronavirus and 129 new deaths,” a top health official, Alireza Vahabzadeh, stated Monday.
The city of Qom, where the latest top clerical death has occurred, is the country’s main place of Shia pilgrimage and Iran’s epicenter for the outbreak.
Initially Qom’s clerical leaders strongly resisted shutting down key shrines which attract millions of people per month on religious pilgrimage. They’ve at times described the outbreak as the judgement of God and a “plague” from the West. But such rhetoric has naturally been less frequent these days as the virus continues to ravage the top layers of Iran’s government.