Ayatollah Khamenei Dead? How Rumours Start

guardian.co.uk News Blog

Only last week Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei was complaining of the spread of rumours in the wake of Iran's violently disputed presidential elections. But that was the last that has officially been heard from him. Since then Khamenei himself has become the main subject of the Iranian rumour mill. It seems to have all been started – or at least given credence – by the leading American neocon Michael Ledeen. Quoting an "excellent" but anonymous source, on Monday he wrote: "Yesterday afternoon at 2.15pm local time Khamenei collapsed and was taken to his special clinic. Nobody – except his son and the doctors – has since been allowed to get near him. His official, but secret, status is 'in the hands of the gods'." Yesterday Ledeen repeated rumours that have been going around the Tehran Bazaar that Khamenei had died. But Ledeen has a track record in spreading misinformation, according to the US magazine Vanity Fair, which claimed he was linked in the false reports that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger – one of the main pretexts for the invasion of Iraq. And in January 2007 he falsely reported Khamenei's death. Nevertheless, his latest rumour about Khamenei's possible death has been picked up by a number of respected bloggers and media organisations including ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the Jerusalem Post, and Pravda. As there are so many restrictions on foreign reporting in Iran the truth is difficult to verify.

But the interest and speculation about Iran has been intense, particularly on Twitter. These are the perfect conditions for rumours to spread. On almost every day of the opposition protests there were false reports that the leading opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi had been arrested. Long before the current Twitter interest in Iran there were rumours about Khamenei's health, but the microblogging site seems to have amplified and embellished them. As the Guardian's former Tehran correspondent Robert Tait says: "Discussions about Khamenei's health problems are legion. He has prostate cancer; he has lung cancer; he is an opium addict; he has lymphatic cancer; he has a mouth full of false teeth since a bomb attack 28 years ago that also cost him the use of an arm; doctors have given him at most two years to live. I don't how much, if any, of this is true. The fact that it's going around at all is a measure of the hysteria surrounding the Iranian political scene." Of course there is an easy way for the clerical regime in Tehran to put a stop to the current hysteria. But the ayatollah has yet to appear to declare that the reports of his death are exaggerated. Until he does, the chances are the rumours will spread.