Mojtaba Khamenei Absent From Ayatollah's Funeral
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- Mojtaba Khamenei was conspicuously absent from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's funeral Sunday, fueling speculation he was wounded in the US-Israeli airstrikes that killed his father in February; he hasn't appeared publicly since being named Supreme Leader in early March.
- Iran's three other Khamenei sons — Masoud, Mostafa, and Meysam — attended alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian and IRGC chief Ahmad Vahidi, as authorities projected 12–20 million mourners across Iran and Iraq for what state media is calling the "funeral of the century."
- President Trump told Axios he paused Iran peace talks for a week around the funeral but added that Washington could take out Iran's senior officials with "one shot" — declining, he said, "because then we would have nobody to negotiate with."
- Trump said he was "surprised" to see Iranians weeping, musing "maybe it's fake tears"; mourner Zahra Safaei, 50, fired back to Reuters: "We did not make a revolution 47 years ago to shed fake tears."
- Mourners at the Tehran service waved banners reading "kill Trump" and "kill Bibi," chanted "death to America" and "death to Israel," and heard poet Mohammad Rasouli declare that "Trump's murder is our responsibility."
- Khamenei's body lay in state at Tehran's Grand Mosalla — a public holiday Sunday — beside the coffins of four relatives killed in the same strike, including his one-year-old granddaughter Zahra Mohammadi Golpayegani, with a Monday procession through Tehran, stops in Qom and Iraq, and burial Thursday in his hometown of Mashhad.
Why it matters: With Mojtaba Khamenei either wounded or in hiding, Iran is running a state funeral for its longtime leader while its designated successor can't safely appear in public — and the man who ordered the strike that killed the elder Khamenei is openly calculating whether to remove the rest of Iran's command in a single blow, restrained only by the need for someone left to negotiate with.
