Iran protesters set fire to Khomeini’s ancestral home

PARIS: Protesters in Iran have set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic republic´s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as two months of anti-regime demonstrations show no letup, images showed on Friday.

The house in the city of Khomein in the western Markazi province was shown ablaze late on Thursday with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past, according to images posted on social media, verified by AFP.

Khomeini is said to have been born at the house in the town of Khomein -- from where his surname derives -- at the turn of the century. He became a cleric deeply critical of the US-backed shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, moved into exile and then returned in triumph from France in 1979 to lead the Islamic revolution.

Khomeini died in 1989 but remains the subject of adulation by the clerical leadership under successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The house was later turned into a museum commemorating Khomeini. It was not immediately clear what damage it sustained.

But Iran´s Tasnim news agency later denied there had been a fire, saying the “door of the historic house is open to visitors”. “The counter-revolutionary media tries to create turmoil by spreading lies and false information. The burning down of Imam Khomeini´s historic house, a place with with spiritual value to Iranians, was one of those lies,” the deputy governor of Markazi province Behnam Nazari was quoted as saying.

The protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by the morality police, pose the biggest challenge from the street to Iran´s leaders since the 1979 revolution. They were fuelled by anger over the obligatory headscarf for women imposed by Khomeini but have turned into a movement calling for an end to the Islamic republic itself.

Images of Khomeini have on occasion been torched or defaced by protesters, in taboo-breaking acts against a figure whose death is still marked each June with a holiday for mourning. Meanwhile, funerals for young Iranians, including a small boy, who families say were killed in a state crackdown, sparked a new wave of anti-regime protests on Friday in the Islamic republic.

Iran´s clerical leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is facing its biggest challenge since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in two months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini. The authorities have responded with a crackdown that a human rights group says has left 342 people dead, half a dozen already sentenced to death and thousands more arrested.

The turbulence comes with intense attention on the response of Iran´s team at the football World Cup in Qatar, which is due to play its first match against England on Monday. Scores flocked to the southwestern city of Izeh for the funeral of Kian Pirfalak, aged nine, according to pictures published by Iran´s ISNA news agency. His mother told the funeral ceremony that Kian was shot on Wednesday by the security forces although Iranian officials have insisted he was killed in a “terrorist” attack.

“Hear it from me myself on how the shooting happened, so they can´t say it was by terrorists, because they´re lying,” his mother told the funeral according to a video posted by the 1500tasvir monitor.

“Maybe they thought we wanted to shoot or something and they peppered the car with bullets... Plainclothes forces shot my child. That is it.” Ridiculing the official version of events, the protesters chanted: “Basij, Sepah -- you are our ISIS!” according to a video posted by Norway-based group Iran Human Rights (IHR).

The Basij is a pro-government paramilitary force and Sepah is another name for Iran´s feared Revolutionary Guards. ISIS is an alternative name for the extremist Islamic State (IS) group.