TEHRAN, July 10: The bodies of Iranian twins Laleh and Ladan Bijani, whose bid to lead separate lives after 29 years joined at the head cost them their lives in a Singapore operating theatre, returned to the Iranian capital on Thursday.
In a sign of respect for the pair, officials announced the twins would be honoured in a ceremony dedicated to the 300 recently recovered bodies of Iranian soldiers who died in the 1980-88 war with Iraq.
The bodies will then be flown for burial on Saturday at their place of birth, the village of Firouzabad in the southern province of Fars.
At Tehran’s Mehrabad airport there were muted but nevertheless emotional scenes as around 100 friends, neighbours and well-wishers gathered to watch the two coffins carried by state officials from an Emirates plane.
Neither the twins’ estranged adoptive parents — who had bitterly opposed the operation — or their real family were there.
Police saluted the coffins, which were covered with dark cloth and bouquets of bright flowers, before they were put into an ambulance and whisked away to a local morgue and then to a prayer hall.
“I was a friend of theirs,” said a tearful Noushin Mehran as she watched the coffins come home. As she began to express her emotion, she broke down in uncontrollable sobbing.
Many Iranians had been glued to their television or radio sets during the ill-fated marathon operation, with state media providing minute-by-minute updates on the progress of the surgery on the women whose unrelenting quest for separation had initially received only limited attention here.
But the operation has sparked conflicting sentiments, amid debate over whether it should ever have gone ahead.
The twins’ adoptive family pointed out that in 1976, Iran’s then future revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa saying that “such an operation was not proper, because doctors had predicted one should be sacrificed for the other”.
Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has conspicuously not given any comment after their deaths even though much of the country has been gripped by the tragic story.
But President Mohammad Khatami and other government officials have expressed their condolences, with the president — a mid-ranking religious leader — praising the two sisters for their “courageous spirit”.
In a message, he called on the Iranian nation to “praise the two sparrows for their high-spirited endurance and toleration of their difficult destiny and their determination to search for a happier future”.
Laden and Lalah died within 90 minutes of each other after the separating of their heads caused massive blood loss.
The twins were born to a poor farming family in southern Iran with the sides of their skulls joined and sharing a vital vein that drained blood from their individual brains.
They had been determined to have the operation even though they knew the odds were high that surgery could kill one or both of them. —AFP