Newlyweds’ Bodies to Go Back to Iran

The Iranian bride who was found dead inside a suitcase at Los Angeles International Airport and the groom who committed suicide three days after he failed to smuggle her into the United States will be going back to Iran together this weekend.

Bill Pierce, of Westwood Village Mortuary, said today that the body of Mahmoud Ayazi, 31, was flown from Sacramento on Tuesday to join the body of Kataun Safaie, 20, whom he had married nearly a month ago in Iran.

Sacramento friends of Ayazi’s, an electrician and Cal State Sacramento graduate, said the newlyweds had taken the desperate chance of smuggling Safaie into the United States in a suitcase last week, when her application for a tourist visa was turned down by U.S. consular officials in Frankfurt, West Germany, where the pair had flown from Iran after their wedding.

Shot Himself

Three days after airport officials found Safaie asphyxiated in the soft-sided suitcase on a luggage carrousel, the distraught Ayazi, who had evidently checked his wife into the luggage before boarding the plane himself, bought a gun and shot himself as he sat in his car in the parking lot of his Sacramento apartment.

Pierce is awaiting paper work from the Algerian Embassy in Washington, which has been handling such matters for Iran since the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with the country following the hostage incident at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

From Los Angeles, Pierce said, the couple will be flown back to Iran for funerals with their two families, who had arranged the marriage. They will be flown home by the same airline route that brought them to the United States: Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Tehran.