High-ranking Iranian cleric assassinated

April 26 (UPI) -- A powerful high-ranking Iranian cleric was gunned down Wednesday in a bank in northern Mazandaran province, according to Iranian news reports.

The clerk, Ayatollah Abbasali Soleimani, was confirmed dead by Ruhollah Solgi, deputy governor of Mazandaran province, Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Surveillance video of the shooting circulating online shows Soleimani, who is in his mid-to-late 70s, sitting in a chair at a Babolsar city bank when a security guard comes up behind him with a gun and opens fire.

The clerk drops back into his chair as his white turban falls to the ground behind him. The gunman is then seen casually walking away from his victim when two men wrest the weapon from his hands.

Solgi said the assailant has been arrested by security forces and is undergoing interrogation.

Mazandaran Gov. Mahmoud Hosseinipour on Wednesday evening told IRNA that the gunman worked for a security company hired by the bank and that his actions were not terrorism-related.

No one else was injured in the shooting.

Soleimani was a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of Islamic jurists that is armed by the Constitution with the power to appoint, monitor and dismiss the country's supreme leader, according to Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit the Brookings Institute.

Though the motive behind the assassination was unclear as of late Wednesday, the shooting comes amid the women-led anti-regime protests that began in September after a 22-year-old woman was killed in police custody following her arrest for violating Iran's draconian hijab laws.

Amid the demonstrations, clerics have become a target of protesters who have knocked their turbans off in the streets.