Huge crowds gathered in the streets of Mashhad for the funeral of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei was laid to rest in Imam Reza’s mausoleum, Iran’s holiest Shia Muslim monument, bringing an end to six days of public mourning in five Iranian towns and neighboring Iraq.
The burial, according to the state news agency IRNA, occurred during an exchange of strikes between Iran and the United States, which threatens to disrupt a tentative agreement to end the conflict in which he was killed.
Earlier, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accused the United States of blasting two bridges on the railway route connecting Tehran and Mashhad overnight “in an effort to overshadow” the funeral. Khamenei and several members of his family were killed in an Israeli raid on his Tehran home on February 28, the first day of Iran’s conflict with the United States and Israel.
He was succeeded as supreme commander by his son Mojtaba, who has not been seen in public since he was allegedly gravely injured in the same attack. The 56-year-old did not attend the funeral rites in Tehran and Qom, and there was no evidence that he attended the burial.
On Thursday morning, an aircraft carrying the coffins of Ali Khamenei, his granddaughter, son-in-law, daughter, and Mojtaba’s wife arrived in Mashhad after flying from Iraq, where large crowds marched to two Shia shrines in Najaf and Karbala.
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