Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was buried Tuesday after frenzied mourners knocked his body to the ground and ripped his white burial shroud to pieces for mementos of the revolutionary who ruled Iran for 10 years.
Thousands of Revolutionary Guards and civilians pushed and shoved around the graveside, kicking up clouds of dust as Khomeini's body was taken from a metal casket and lowered to the grave.”They are burying a sacred body,” screamed a television announcer, his voice hoarse with emotion, as soldiers piled concrete blocks on top of the shrouded body.
Khomeini, the driving force of Iran's Islamic revolution, died Saturday at age 86. Amid scenes of mass hysteria, the huge crowd surrounding the grave beat their heads with their hands in expressions of grief and threw dust on themselves to show they wanted to be buried with their spiritual patriarch.
Several people were knocked unconscious in crushes at the cemetery and earlier at Mosalla Mosque, where mourners halted the nearly 10-hour funeral procession. They blocked the path of a van driving the body to the cemetery, grabbed the corpse out of an open wooden coffin and ripped the shroud to pieces. The body fell to the ground. State television later showed mourners grabbing the body and pulling the shroud, until the feet could be seen. The broadcast then was cut off abruptly for several minutes.
The body was rewrapped, placed in a closed metal casket and airlifted to the Baheshte Zahra cemetery, with mourners clinging to the helicopter's landing sled until it was several feet off the ground.
https://www.deseret.com/1989/6/6/18810045/khomeini-buried-after-mourners-tear-off-shroud/
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday defended the United States’ overnight strikes on Iran as “absolutely necessary,” arguing that Washington had to respond forcefully after Tehran allegedly violated a ceasefire by attacking commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, as the latest military escalation triggered retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the Gulf.
The renewed hostilities sparked retaliatory attacks across the Gulf on Wednesday, with Bahrain reporting explosions after air raid sirens sounded and Kuwait confirming its air defense systems were intercepting incoming missiles and drones.