Son possible candidate to replace Khamenei, Israel says whoever chosen will be ‘a target for elimination’
Iran announced that a state funeral for supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which had been planned for Wednesday evening in Tehran, was postponed ‘in anticipation of unprecedented turnout,’ state television reported, reports Agence France-Presse .
‘The farewell ceremony for the martyred Imam has been postponed. The new date will be announced later,’ Iranian television reported on Wednesday after Khamenei was killed at 86 in US-Israeli strikes over the weekend.
On Wednesday morning, authorities had said a tribute would take place that same evening in Tehran before Khamenei’s body was buried in the holy city of Mashhad, where he was from.
Authorities did not link the postponement to the security situation.
It was partly down to ‘the expected participation of millions of people and the need to provide the proper infrastructure’ for such a crowd, Mohsen Mahmoudi, head of Tehran’s Islamic Development Coordination Council, the body organising the event, told state TV.
Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of Khamenei has long been considered a contender to the post of the country’s next paramount ruler — even before an Israeli strike killed his father at the start of the war last week and despite the fact he’s has never been elected or appointed to a government position, reports AP/United News of Bangladesh.
A secretive figure within the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen publicly since Saturday, when the Israeli airstrike targeting the supreme leader’s offices killed his 86-year-old father. Also killed were the younger Khamenei’s wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, who came from a family long associated with the country’s theocracy.
Khamenei is believed to still be alive and has likely has gone into hiding as American and Israeli airstrikes continue to pound Iran, though state-run Iranian media have not reported on his whereabouts.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s name continues to circulate as a possible candidate to replace his father, something that had been criticised in the past as potentially creating a theocratic version of Iran’s former hereditary monarchy.
But now with his father and wife considered by hard-liners as martyrs in the war against America and Israel, Khamenei’s stock likely has risen with the aging clerics of the 88-seat Assembly of Experts who will select the country’s next supreme leader.
Whoever becomes the leader will gain control of an Iranian military now at war and a stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be used to build a nuclear weapon — should he choose to decree it.
Khamenei had occupied a similar role to that of Ahmad Khomeini, a son of Iran’s first Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini — ‘a combination of aide-de-camp, confidant, gatekeeper and power broker,’ according to United Against Nuclear Iran, a US-based pressure group.
Born in 1969 in the city of Mashhad, some 10 years before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that would sweep Iran, Khamenei grew up as his father agitated against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran.
An official biography on Ali Khamenei’s life recounts one moment when the shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, broke into their home and beat the cleric. Woken up after, Mojtaba and the rest of Khamenei’s children were told their father was going on vacation.
Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz warned that whoever is chosen as Iran’s next supreme leader will be ‘a target for elimination.’
In a post on X, Katz said, ‘Every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime to continue and lead the plan to destroy Israel, to threaten the United States and the free world and the countries of the region, and to suppress the Iranian people — will be a target for elimination.’
The warning comes as Israel struck a building linked to Iran’s Assembly of Experts on Tuesday. The assembly is responsible for selecting the country’s next supreme leader following the death of 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in an Israeli strike on Saturday, which marked the beginning of the current conflict.
