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 today (3 July) 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 US 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 yesterday (2 July) in Mashhad, home to the country's holiest pilgrim shrine.

Critical moment for Islamic republic

His coffin was unveiled late yesterday 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. Today 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.

But nearly five decades after the 1979 revolution, and for all the official proclamations of national unity in the run-up to Khamenei's funeral, the Islamic Republic has rarely been so internally fractured.

Support for the clerical leadership is paper thin, analysts say, and the new Supreme Leader, Khamenei's son Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen in any new image since being wounded in the strike that killed his father.

Years of crippling sanctions have paralysed the economy as accelerating bouts of mass nationwide protests have been put down by security forces with increasing force - culminating in the killing of thousands of demonstrators in January.

Those deep problems have been brushed aside this week, with the authorities mounting a display of state power and mass support, mobilising what they hope will be millions of mourners to take part in the funeral.

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 today, 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.