The state funeral for Iran’s slain supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, already delayed for more than three months, will be pushed back again to late June or early July, the mayor of Tehran said, extending one of the most politically sensitive loose ends of the country’s wartime transition.

Mayor Alireza Zakani, in a statement carried by the state-run Fars news agency, said the three-day ceremony had been postponed until after the first 10 days of Muharram, the opening month of the Islamic calendar. Iran had previously planned to hold the event in early Muharram, which would have placed it in early June, and the new timing points to a burial in the second 10 days of the month, roughly between June 26 and July 5. Officials have said they expect as many as 20 million people to attend.

The announcement stretches out an already extraordinary delay. Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28 in a US-Israeli strike on his Tehran compound at the start of the war, and more than 100 days later his body has still not been buried. Senior military commanders and other officials killed in the same conflict have already been laid to rest, even as repeated promises of a mass funeral for the longtime leader have gone unfulfilled. Plans call for ceremonies spanning several cities before a final burial in the city of Mashhad, his birthplace.

The originally planned three-day farewell tour, set for early March, was the first to slip. State television said at the time that the farewell had been postponed “in anticipation of unprecedented turnout,” with organizers citing the expected participation of millions and the infrastructure needed to manage such crowds. Days later, authorities scrapped a planned procession over security concerns, prompting a wave of sarcastic and angry commentary on Iranian social media.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)