Mourners Tear Away Khomeini’s Shroud, Turning Burial to Chaos

The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian revolution and firebrand of Middle East politics, was buried in a simple grave Tuesday--after frenzied mourners snatched away his shroud and tore it into pieces for relics.

As the 86-year-old Shiite Muslim leader was borne to his grave in the Cemetery of Martyrs south of the capital, a throng of mourners toppled his simple wooden coffin to the ground.

Masses of people surged in, chanting, “Imam! Imam!” Many, among them dozens of Revolutionary Guards, reached out to touch the body. Some ripped away bits of the shroud and the green, white and red Iranian flag wrapped around it.

Because of the frenzied crowd, the coffin bearers could not make it to the open grave. At one point, the body fell out of the plain coffin--the legs projecting from the shroud--and was dumped back in. Khomeini’s son, Ahmed, was knocked down and lost his black turban. He looked dazed as he was hoisted above the crowd and passed from hand to hand to an ambulance.

The helicopter that had borne the ayatollah’s body to the cemetery, then taken off, was summoned back along with a second aircraft--almost causing disaster with its whirling rotor blades as it settled in among the massed mourners.

Bearers manhandled the coffin back aboard the copter, which at first was unable to take off because of a dozen or so people hanging from the sides and the skids. Soldiers fired pistols in the air to try to quell the crowd, but with little effect.

Some rushed to the grave and scooped up handfuls of dirt around the site as mementos, and others appeared to slip into the open hole.

At last, security personnel pulled off the hangers-on, and the craft took off again.

Try to Restore Order

The ayatollah’s body was flown away, reportedly back to his residence, as Revolutionary Guards and police tried to restore order at the cemetery.

Hours later, they had cleared the area around the grave, and a helicopter arrived carrying political strongman Hashemi Rafsanjani, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament. The Revolutionary Guards had cleared the immediate area and opened a passage to the grave site. Rafsanjani apparently satisfied himself that order had been restored, and then a helicopter carrying Khomeini’s re-wrapped body was ordered in, arriving about 4:30 p.m. This time the corpse was in a large, latched aluminum case.

Chaos nonetheless ensued once again, with mourners surging forward to try to touch the coffin. Fights broke out as idling helicopter blades kicked up dust. And, with the temperature exceeding 100 degrees, firefighters used hoses to try to cool the sweltering crowd.

Bearers finally managed to get the coffin to the grave site, where the container’s aluminum top was removed and the shrouded body placed hastily in the grave. Loose dirt was heaped atop the body and large, flat stones were placed atop the grave to protect it.

Mourners Surge In

Immediately afterward, thousands of black-clad mourners surged in, many of them throwing themselves on the grave, wailing and beating themselves on the head and chest in the traditional Shiite show of grief.

An Iranian television announcer, describing the scene, broke into shrieks and sobs.

Khomeini’s grave lies about a quarter of a mile from the main Cemetery of Martyrs, known in Persian as Behesht-e Zahra. The cemetery is the place of burial for victims of the 1978-79 Iranian revolution and casualties of the eight-year war with Iraq. Its centerpiece is a large fountain that pours out red-colored water symbolizing martyrs’ blood.

Iranian sources said a mosque will likely be built over Khomeini’s grave, a site that will undoubtedly become the object of Shiite pilgrimages.

Khomeini, the dominant figure of the minority Shiite sect of Islam, died Saturday of heart failure following stomach surgery. Before Tuesday, the Middle East had seen no such seething mass demonstration for one of its leaders since the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970.

The long funeral began with obsequies at 7 a.m. at the prayer ground in north Tehran where Khomeini lay in state under a large glass case. Tens of thousands turned out for the ceremonies and flooded the streets in central Tehran, bringing traffic to a standstill.

That morning prayer service, too, was chaotic, with Ahmed Khomeini in the first row of mourners standing over the imam’s shrouded body on the ground, and Rafsanjani in the second line of officials.

The ayatollah’s body was placed in the wooden coffin and moved hand over hand, tilting crazily, to the back of a refrigerated truck for the ride to the cemetery. But the roads were so jammed that the body was transferred to a helicopter for the flight to south Tehran.

The funeral was a dramatic illustration of revolutionary Iran’s isolation from the rest of the world. Pakistani President Gulam Ishaq Khan was the only head of state present, according to Reuters news service. Some Arab and Muslim nations sent lower-level envoys, and leaders of a number of guerrilla movements were seen.

There was no envoy from the West, whose bad relations with Iran sank even lower in February when Khomeini called for the execution of Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie for blasphemy.

With Khomeini buried, attention will be focused on the coming struggle for political power in the nation of nearly 50 million, which has rich oil reserves but which was stricken by the Persian Gulf War, in which it lost hundreds of thousands of its young men.

The 83-member Assembly of Experts, which on Sunday appointed President Ali Khamenei to succeed Khomeini as supreme religious authority, said Tuesday that Khamenei’s decisions are binding on Iranians. However, Khomeini--whose return from exile in 1979 led to the revolution that toppled the Pahlavi monarchy--also exercised supreme political authority here, and it is not clear who will inherit that mantle.

Specialists in Iranian politics noted late Tuesday that Rafsanjani, the Speaker and the armed forces commander, seemed to be the most prominent mourner at the cemetery. Iran holds presidential elections in August, when Khamenei’s term ends, and Rafsanjani is the only declared candidate.