Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was buried Tuesday after frenzied mourners knocked his body to the ground and ripped his white burial shroud to pieces for mementos of the revolutionary who ruled Iran for 10 years.
Thousands of Revolutionary Guards and civilians pushed and shoved around the graveside, kicking up clouds of dust as Khomeini's body was taken from a metal casket and lowered to the grave."They are burying a sacred body," screamed a television announcer, his voice hoarse with emotion, as soldiers piled concrete blocks on top of the shrouded body.
"Oh, Father, don't leave your children! Oh, father, don't leave your beloved!" he wailed.
Khomeini, the driving force of Iran's Islamic revolution, died Saturday at age 86.
Amid scenes of mass hysteria, the huge crowd surrounding the grave beat their heads with their hands in expressions of grief and threw dust on themselves to show they wanted to be buried with their spiritual patriarch.
Several people were knocked unconscious in crushes at the cemetery and earlier at Mosalla Mosque, where mourners halted the nearly 10-hour funeral procession.
They blocked the path of a van driving the body to the cemetery, grabbed the corpse out of an open wooden coffin and ripped the shroud to pieces. The body fell to the ground.
In the chaos, Khomeini's son was knocked down but appeared uninjured.
State television later showed mourners grabbing the body and pulling the shroud, until the feet could be seen. The broadcast then was cut off abruptly for several minutes.
The body was rewrapped, placed in a closed metal casket and airlifted to the Baheshte Zahra cemetery, with mourners clinging to the helicopter's landing sled until it was several feet off the ground.
Khomeini was buried next to Iranians who helped him seize power in the 1979 revolution that toppled a 2,500-year-old monarchy, and soldiers killed in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
There was no immediate word on whether people were killed or injured in the crowd that gathered in 91-degree heat. At least eight people were killed and hundreds hurt on Monday during a similar huge show of mass grief.