IRAN’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not spoken or been seen in public since his appointment at the weekend, is injured but “safe”, officials said Wednesday.
“I heard news that Mr Mojtaba Khamenei had been injured. I have asked some friends who had connections,” the Iranian president’s son, Yousef Pezeshkian, wrote in a post on his Telegram channel.
“They told me that, thank God, he is safe and sound,” added Pezeshkian, who is a government advisor.
Khamenei was named Iran’s supreme leader on Sunday to replace his father Ali who was assassinated in an air strike at the start of the US-Israeli war against the Islamic republic on February 28.
“He was also there and he was injured in that bombardment but I haven’t seen that reflected in the foreign news,” Tehran’s ambassador to Cyprus, Alireza Salarian, told The Guardian newspaper on Wednesday.
The strike on the compound in central Tehran also killed other members of the Khamenei family, including Mojtaba’s wife and mother, according to Iranian authorities.
There had been mounting questions about Mojtaba Khamenei’s health, and even speculation online that he might have died along with his relatives.
State television had called him a “wounded veteran of the Ramadan war” without giving details, in reference to the conflict which broke out during the Muslim holy month.
His face has appeared on giant billboards in Tehran, with one showing him symbolically receiving the national flag from his father Ali while the founding leader of the Islamic republic, Ruhollah Khomeini, looks on.
Posters of him were brandished by thousands of pro-government demonstrators at a huge rally in central Tehran on Monday.
But night-time cries of “Death to Mojtaba!” in the capital have also underlined public opposition to a figure believed to have played a key role in repressing waves of anti-government protests since 2009.
Quoting three unnamed Iranian officials, The New York Times also reported Wednesday that Khamenei “had suffered injuries, including to his legs, but that he was alert and sheltering at a highly secure location with limited communication”.
Two Israeli military officials also told the newspaper that their intelligence services believed Khamenei had suffered leg injuries.
Given that the new Iranian commander-in-chief instantly became a target for assassination by the United States and Israel at the weekend, analysts said he would remain out of public view for some time.
Emile Hokayem, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he expected him “to sit in a bunker somewhere for a very long time because he saw what happened to his father, his wife, his mother who were all killed in the initial attack”.
“Killing him early is certainly an Israeli priority. If he survives, he becomes a totem, a testimony to the resilience of the system,” Hokayem told an online event organised by his think-tank on Monday.
He said he expected Khamenei to delegate power to run the government to national security chief Ali Larijani and the war effort to powerful parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
The army and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) both pledged allegiance to Khamenei after his nomination, as did the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Hezbollah armed group in Lebanon.
Russian President Vladimir Putin promised “unwavering support”.
Before his nomination, US President Donald Trump had warned that Khamenei would be “unacceptable” as new supreme leader.