Word: zahra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Many of these basij will end up at Beheshteh Zahra, the sprawling martyrs' cemetery south of Tehran, where red water symbolizing martyrs' blood flows from a fountain. Every day bulldozers work at the cemetery, carving out new rectangular plots the size of Olympic swimming pools for those slain in battle. Gravediggers say they fill one with bodies in two weeks. The dead arrive so rapidly that pieces of cardboard, usually stapled with photographs of the fallen, mark burial sites until marble slabs can be put in place. Wives and mothers in chadors, the flowing black robes, move silently through...
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...
...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...