A member of the council advising Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei died after contracting the coronavirus.
Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a 71-year-old member of the Ayatollah’s Expediency Council, was one of the latest Iranians to succumb to the COVID-19 virus while receiving treatment at a hospital in Tehran. The Expediency Council advises the supreme leader and mitigates disputes between Parliament and Guardian Council, which oversees and validates elections.
The 45-member Expediency Council met with Khamenei as recently as February. Khamenei and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is also a member of the council, were all in contact with Mirmohammadi during the meeting, according to the Associated Press. Mirmohammadi’s mother also died of the illness.
The coronavirus can live within a person for several weeks before an individual shows symptoms of the highly contagious disease. The outbreak of the coronavirus in Iran has been one of the worst, outside of China. More than 1,500 have been infected with 66 confirmed deaths. Although more people have been infected in Italy and South Korea, Iran carries the highest death toll outside of China.
Several other Iranian leaders have been infected by the virus, including Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi and Masoumeh Ebtekar, a vice president of the Islamic Republic and a spokeswoman for the Iranian government during the 1979 hostage crisis. Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei acknowledged the illnesses, saying, “We will have two difficult weeks ahead.”
Iran shut down schools and universities in an effort to contain the virus but refused to close access to major Shiite shrines in the holy cities of Mashhad and Qom, both of which have high coronavirus infection rates.
On Saturday, President Trump announced that he was banning travel into the United States by anyone who had visited Iran within the past 14 days. The first case of the coronavirus reported in New York City was a confirmed case in a woman who had recently traveled to Iran. Trump also placed a travel advisory warning against nonessential travel to parts of Italy and South Korea.
