According to Kuwaiti media cited by the British newspaper Daily Mail on its website, Iran’s injured new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, was rushed to Moscow for emergency surgery on his leg.
Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, succeeded his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after his assassination on February 28.
As the Daily Mail reports, there were claims that Khamenei was in a coma at Tehran’s Sina University Hospital following the U.S. and Israeli airstrike that targeted Iran’s leadership.
His injuries allegedly required his transfer to Russia for an operation that was “personally offered by Putin,” according to the news agency Al-Jarida, the Daily Mail also writes, noting that the mission to get the new Ayatollah out of the country was intended to be highly secret and included placing him on a Russian military aircraft.
He was then reportedly taken to one of Putin’s presidential palaces, where he underwent a “successful” surgical operation.
The report remains unconfirmed, but Al-Jarida claims it received its information from a “high-ranking source close to Iran’s new supreme leader.”
A separate source told The Sun, through secret messages sent to an exiled dissident living in London, that Mojtaba Khamenei was very seriously injured in the attack and that both of his legs had been amputated.
As is known, on Friday U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a Pentagon briefing that “Mojtaba Khamenei is injured, likely disfigured.”
“We know that the new, so-called, not-so-supreme leader has been injured and likely disfigured,” Hegseth said. He also stated that Iran’s leaders are “hiding like rats.”
“There was no voice and there was no video. It was a written statement,” he said. “Iran has plenty of cameras and plenty of voice-recording devices. Why a written statement? I think you know why,” he added, commenting on Mojtaba Khamenei’s first address, which was delivered as a written text read out on Iranian state television.
“Closing” appears to be a site/navigation label in the source text, so I left it out of the translation itself.
Ask me anything
Explore related questions