LOHRASB, Iran, 13 July 2003 — More than 20,000 Iranians turned out to pay their last respects at the funeral of Siamese twins Laleh and Ladan Bijani here yesterday.
The twins, joined at the head for the entire 29 years of their lives, died on the operating table in Singapore in a failed attempt to separate them.
They were buried in their native village of Lohrasb, where the massive turnout underlined how much the couple had captured the hearts of their compatriots and millions of others worldwide who had followed their plight on television.
The funeral cortege left from the mortuary in Firuzabad, 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Chiraz, and well-wishers lined the roadside all along the 10 kilometer (6-mile) route leading to their native village.
People had come from miles around, by car, bus and motorcycle, creating a huge bottleneck at the entrance to the village, holding up the cortege and the two Iranian Red Crescent ambulances adorned with flowers and bearing the two coffins, for around half-an-hour.
As the procession left the mortuary, a group of young girls formed a guard of honor and placed flowers on the coffins, which were then driven by ambulance to Lohrasb.
Laleh and Ladan were born in Lohrasb, where their parents still live in poverty, but were adopted by a wealthy couple from Tehran where the twins went to live and completed their studies.
Their real parents contacted them again two years ago and the family was reunited.
In the tiny village cemetery, in blistering heat, a huge crowd pressed inside, allowing only a few verses of the scripture to be recited and leaving no room for those present to perform the prayer ritual for the dead.
The earthen walls of the small family house were draped with black cloth and covered with messages of condolence in Persian and English.
The family, particularly the twins’ mother, their elder sister Soheila and younger brother were in floods of tears, and when Laleh and Ladan’s father lay down in one of the tombs, as tradition demands, the crowd broke into violent sobs.
Laleh was first to be buried and Ladan was laid to rest in an adjacent grave some 20 minutes later.
Rahim Ebadi, adviser to President Mohammad Khatami and chairman of the national youth organization, called for the twins’ birthday to be declared a “day of hope”.
President Khatami sent a message of condolence, calling on the nation to “pay tribute to these two sparrows for their courageous spirit, their tolerance of a difficult destiny and their will for a happier future”.
Before the operation, the twins declared that they were prepared to accept the risks they were running, knowing that it could prove fatal to one or both of them.
The historic operation to separate the sisters, which had never been attempted on adult conjoined twins before, ended tragically when they died within 90 minutes of each other after a marathon operation at Singapore’s Raffles Hospital on Tuesday.
Doctors said the two women lost too much blood at the crucial neurosurgical stage of the 52-hour operation to survive.
Yesterday, a doctor who was involved in the unsuccessful attempt to separate them said he would not recommend a similar operation.
“With the knowledge that has been gained here, I would not do it the same way... armed with this information, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about it and I would probably discourage people from it,” American neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson told the BBC world service.
