Iran's slain leader Khamenei laid in state in Tehran for week of mass funeral events

The body of Iran's slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was lying in state in a vast hall in Tehran on Friday as clerics, officials, foreign dignitaries and other mourners paid their respects after his 37-year rule.

Iran is staging a week of mass funeral processions for Khamenei — killed in February by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes at the ‌start of a four-month war — in a show of public devotion to the Islamic Republic's theocratic state and revolutionary fire.

Khamenei's body was expected to be taken to Qom, Najaf and Kerbala, the great Shi'ite centres of Iran and Iraq, before being laid to rest on Thursday in Mashhad, home to the country's holiest pilgrim shrine.

His coffin was unveiled late on Thursday to a throng of sobbing supporters, swaying and beating their heads in time to a sung lament as flowers were thrown from the bier into the crowd. On Friday the coffin — and those of family members killed with him — was laid in state in the great prayer hall built to honour his predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The funeral comes at a critical moment for Iran, where the clerical rulers backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are riding high from surviving what they saw as an existential ⁠war against their greatest and most powerful foes.

Tehran streets were tightly controlled, with military and police vehicles lining the major roads and police and members of the black-shirted volunteer Basij paramilitary force patrolling on motorbikes. Iran warned the United States and Israel against any attacks during the funeral.

After the coffins arrived on Friday, borne high across the upraised hands of a waiting crowd, they were laid in the prayer hall on a white, stepped, dais before a high, intricately tiled, arched recess, flanked by national and black mourning flags.

A black turban, worn by clerics claiming descent from Islam's Prophet Mohammed, lay on the coffin on a ‌folded chequered scarf, ⁠a symbol in Iran of militant revolutionary ideals and solidarity with Palestinians.

Representatives from Russia and China were expected to attend. Top Iraqi, Armenian and Pakistani politicians arrived in Tehran for the funeral.

Families of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and senior commander Imad Mughniyeh attended the ceremony.

Iran's own political leaders — the president, parliament speaker, foreign minister and others — filed in to weep and pray on Friday morning.

Reuters