| ||
| ||
| ||
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Thousands see Iranian twins buried
LOHRASB, Iran -- The Iranian conjoined twins who touched the world, Ladan and Laleh Bijani, were buried side by side, but in different graves, in their home village as thousands mourned the courageous sisters. Mourners lined the hillsides and beat their chests Saturday as a Muslim cleric read verses from the Koran and the bodies were carried aloft to the graveyard close to their parents' mud-brick home in a remote valley in southern Iran. Born joined at the head, the sisters died on the operating table in Singapore Tuesday aged 29 in the final stages of a lengthy and risky attempt to separate them. "We are content. They came to us before they went for the operation and they got a letter of consent from us. They went into the operations of their own free will," their father Dadollah Bijani told Reuters. The burial was delayed until Saturday because of the number of mourners trying to pay their respects. Shops around Lohrasb were closed as hundreds of people in black filed past the coffins, paying their respects to the twins who died during a 54-hour operation. Female Red Crescent workers tossed flowers onto the bodies as Laleh and Ladan were laid to rest. "The deaths of Laleh and Ladan are a very heavy burden on us and it has deeply touched all of us," their cousin Ghorbanali Behzadi told Reuters. "Their cheerful spirits and sacrifice is a lesson of resilience for everyone." Their modest mud-brick home was draped in black banners. "We send our condolences to the Iranian nation on the departure of these two birds, Laleh and Ladan," read one. Surgeons who operated on the twins in Singapore had tried to convince them not to go through with the marathon surgery to separate their fused heads, but the women insisted, a U.S. doctor from the team said in an interview broadcast on Friday. Dr. Ben Carson said he never thought the operation had a reasonable chance of success. And he said members of the surgical team that operated on the women made "a great deal of effort" to try to talk them out of it beforehand. Ladan and Laleh died on Tuesday, 90 minutes apart, from a severe loss of blood as doctors were in the final stages of the marathon operation to separate them in Singapore.
"They absolutely could not be dissuaded," Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, said in a television interview. "I think even if one minute before surgery, they had said, 'We've changed our minds,' we all would have been extremely happy," he said of the surgical team. The twins were born into a poor farming family 29 years ago and were kept in a hospital in the provincial capital Shiraz. Their father says the pair went missing after U.S. doctors who were looking after the sisters fled the country during the confusion of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Years later he tracked them down to Karaj, near the capital Tehran, where a wealthy doctor had adopted them. The doctor, Alireza Safaian, says he found the twins abandoned in hospital. Despite a court ruling awarding father-of-11 Bijani custody, the twins decided to stay with Safaian, unable to face life working on a farm in their village. But the twins later grew estranged from Safaian and, the doctor told Reuters, he had not been in contact with them for around 18 months. Government official Rahim Ebadi, head of the National Youth Organization, proposed making the twins' December 31 birthday a "national day of love." Ebadi made the proposal in a letter to President Mohammad Khatami, the English-language Iran Daily reported. In their wills, the twins donated their belongings to blind children and orphans. CNN.com received thousands of tributes from readers who were moved by the twins' bravery. (Your say) Copyright 2003 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
