Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, is one of the top candidates to take over as the country’s new leader.
The Assembly of Experts, which is the highest religious body, will choose Khamenei’s successor. Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Assembly, told Iranian state media yesterday that they wanted to vote “at the earliest opportunity.”
According to AFP, Alireza Arafi, one of the three members of the interim council administering the country, hardliner Mohsen Araki, and even Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the man who founded the republic in 1979, are all in the race for the top job.
Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, would be a hereditary transition that his father didn’t like in 2024.
The shah led a royal dynasty in Iran that lasted for hundreds of years.
Mojtaba Khamenei was born on September 8, 1969, in the holy city of Mashhad in eastern Iran. He is one of the late supreme leader’s six children.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died on Saturday in Tehran at the age of 86, after one of the first US-Israeli missile attacks of the conflict.
Because he is careful about what he says in public and in the media, many people in Iran and in diplomatic circles have been guessing about Mojtaba’s real power for years.
He is the only kid of the former supreme commander who has a public role, even if he doesn’t have an official job.
Some people say that the cleric, who has a salt-and-pepper beard and the black turban of the “seyyed,” or descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, is the real boss and is in charge of the government in Iran.
People think he is linked to conservatives, especially because he is connected to the Revolutionary Guards, which is the country’s ideological army.
This relationship goes back to when he was in a military unit at the end of the conflict between Iraq and Iran from 1980 to 1988.
Links to Security Forces
During President Donald Trump’s first term in 2019, the US Treasury Department put sanctions on Mojtaba Khamenei. They said that the Iranian represented the supreme leader “despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father.”
It added that Ali Khamenei had “delegated a part of his leadership responsibilities” to his son, who “worked closely” with Iranian security forces “to advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives.”
Critics have accused him of being involved in the brutal crackdown that followed the re-election of ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, which led to a huge protest movement.
Bloomberg news reports, which used unnamed sources and reports from Western security agencies, say that Mojtaba Khamenei has made more over $100 million.
The paper says that money from oil sales had been funneled through shell firms in tax havens into investments in luxury British real estate, hotels in Europe, and property in Dubai.
He studied theology at Qom, a holy city south of Tehran, where he also taught.
He became a Hujjat al-Islam, which is a title for mid-level clerics. His father, Ruhollah Khomeini, was an Ayatollah, which is a higher position.
Iranian officials said that his wife, Zahra Haddad-Adel, who was the daughter of a previous speaker of parliament, also died in the US-Israeli bombings that killed the supreme commander.
Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, said yesterday that whoever takes over for Ali Khamenei will be “a target.”
Every eight years, people vote for the 88 members of the Assembly of Experts.
It has only been in charge of one change of leadership thus far, when Khamenei was chosen in 1989 after Khomeini died.
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