Word: behesht
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...Gohari family reunions take place in the Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery at the edge of the dusty Veramin plain on the outskirts of Tehran. Hussein Gohari, 14, squats next to the graves where his father Essa and his brothers Hassan and Ali lie, all killed in the conflict with Iraq. His mother, like many of the other widows at the cemetery, carefully washes her husband's gravestone, then sits with one hand on it in prayer. "We come every Friday," says Hussein. Soon his mother may be left alone to tend the graves. Hussein is ready, eager even, to join...
While the Ayatullah's body lay in state inside a refrigerated glass box, the crowd of mourners in Tehran became so thick that eight were reportedly crushed to death. The next day, as a helicopter brought the open wooden coffin containing Khomeini's remains to the city's Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, nearly a million mourners thrust forward in the blistering heat and choking dust, many wailing and pounding their heads as they groped to touch the body and snatch a piece of the linen burial shroud...
TIME has learned through sources within the Khomeini regime that the prisoners, including a number of teenagers, were taken from Evin to unknown locations and murdered. Relatives of other executed dissidents stumbled upon "mounds of untended bodies" at Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery, south of Tehran, and were able to identify some as the missing prisoners. SAVAK agents under the Shah once used the same cemetery as a dumping ground for their murdered victims, burying the bodies in unmarked graves. For the first time since Iran's clerical government took over in February 1979, the mass execution was not announced...
...also vowed to press on with a purge aimed at eliminating their opposition. The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement blaming the U.S. and Iraq for the attack, and demonstrators chanted, "Death to America, the Great Satan!" as the two coffins were carried through Tehran's streets to Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery...
After all the demonstrations of anger and mourning that have punctuated the year-long crisis, Iran went wild with joy. From all across the country, millions of people thronged into the capital; they lined the 20-mile route out to Behesht-Zahra Cemetery, where many of the martyrs of the revolution are buried, to catch a glimpse of the Ayatullah. "The holy one has come!" they shouted triumphantly. "He is the light of our lives!" So heavy was the crush of people that Khomeini had to be lifted from his motorcade and flown the last mile to the cemetery...