Protesters in Iran set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on Thursday. This incident came two months after the anti-regime protest movement that started after the death of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini. She was detained by morality police for allegedly breaking the strict hijab rules. The protests broke out after Amini’s death which has posed the biggest challenge from the street to Iran's leaders since the 1979 revolution. The house in the city of Khomein in the western Markazi province was shown ablaze late Thursday with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past, according to images posted on social media, as verified by the news agency AFP.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency later denied there had been a fire, saying the “door of the historic house is open to visitors”. Khomeini, who is said to have been born at the house in the town of Khomein at the turn of the century, died in 1989 but remains the subject of adulation by the clerical leadership under successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
He became a cleric deeply critical of the US-backed shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, moved into exile, and then returned in triumph from France in 1979 to lead the Islamic revolution. The house was later turned into a museum commemorating Khomeini. It was not immediately clear what damage it sustained.
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.
(With AFP Inputs)