Iran held a state funeral service yesterday for about 60 people, including its military commanders, killed in its war with Israel, after Tehran’s top diplomat condemned US President Donald Trump’s comments on Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “unacceptable.”
The proceedings started at 8am in Tehran, as government offices and many businesses were closed for the occasion.
“The ceremony to honor the martyrs has officially started,” state TV said, showing footage of thousands of people donning black clothes, waving Iranian flags and holding pictures of the slain military commanders.
Photo: AFP
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, along with other senior government officials and military commanders — including Esmail Qaani, head of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of the Revolutionary Guards — attended the event.
Senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ali Shamkhani, who was targeted and wounded during the war, also took part in the ceremony, state TV showed.
Images also displayed mock-ups of Iranian ballistic missiles as well as coffins draped in Iranian flags and bearing portraits of the deceased commanders in uniform near Enghelab Square, where the march began.
A patriotic eulogy blared from loudspeakers as the procession set out across the sprawling metropolis toward Azadi Square.
“Boom boom Tel Aviv,” read one banner, referring to Iranian missiles fired at Israel during the conflict in retaliation for its attacks on Iran.
Among the dead is Mohammad Bagheri, a major general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the second-in-command of the armed forces after the Iranian leader.
He is to be buried alongside his wife and daughter, a journalist for a local media outlet, all killed in an Israeli attack.
Scientist Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, also killed in the attacks, is to be buried with his wife.
Revolutionary Guards commander Hossein Salami, who was killed on the first day of the war, is also be laid to rest after the ceremony — which would also honor at least 30 other top commanders.
Of the 60 people who are to be laid to rest after the ceremony, four are children and four are women.
The US had carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear sites last weekend, joining ally Israel’s bombardments of Iran’s nuclear program
Trump on his Truth Social platform said he knew exactly where Khamenei was sheltered and did not let Israel or the US Armed Forces “terminate his life.”
He also said he had been working on the possible removal of sanctions against Iran, one of Tehran’s main demands.
Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi condemned the comments, saying: “If President Trump is genuine about wanting a deal, he should put aside the disrespectful and unacceptable tone towards Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei.”
“The Great and Powerful Iranian People, who showed the world that the Israeli regime had NO CHOICE but to RUN to ‘Daddy’ to avoid being flattened by our Missiles, do not take kindly to Threats and Insults,” he said.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
RSS