Prominent activist Thaer al-Tayeb was severely wounded when a sticky device attached to his car exploded while he was on his way back to Diwaniyah from Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on December 15, 2019. He was announced dead in hospital two days later.
“The al-Qadisiyah criminal court issued a death sentence against Kifah al-Kuraiti after the assassination in Diwaniyah province which targeted activist Thaer al-Tayeb,” read a statement from the Iraqi judiciary.
The announcement of the activist’s death prompted angry protesters in Diwaniyah to set ablaze offices of the pro-Iran militias of Asaib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) and Badr, and further charged the hundreds of thousands of people holding mass anti-corruption protests in most Iraqi provinces.
The ruling against Tayeb’s killer comes as demonstrators head towards Tahrir Square on Tuesday to mark the third anniversary of the Tishreen protests branching out from Baghdad to the rest of the country. At least 40 were killed and more than 2,000 others injured across Iraq on October 25, 2019.
Thousands of Iraqi people took to the streets in nationwide demonstrations on October 1, 2019, - later to be titled the Tishreen movement - protesting the country’s poor economic conditions, unemployment, foreign interference, and overall corruption. The protests resulted in the resignation of then-Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, the approval of a new electoral law, and snap parliamentary elections.
