Three sons of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei joined prayers beside his coffin in Tehran on Sunday, but Mojtaba Khamenei, the son who has already succeeded him as Iran's supreme leader, was conspicuously absent from the high-profile funeral rites.
After days of tightly choreographed mourning in the Iranian capital, where state television has followed every stage of Khamenei's farewell. The former supreme leader was killed on 28 February in a US–Israeli bombing of Iranian targets at the start of the war, an attack that also claimed several of his close relatives. Since then, the authorities have leaned heavily on spectacle and symbolism to project continuity at the top of the Islamic Republic, even as questions about Mojtaba's condition and visibility have grown louder.
