Protesters in Iran set fire to Khomeini's ancestral home

Protesters in Iran have set on fire the ancestral home of the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, two months into the anti-regime protest movement, images showed on Friday.

The house in the city of Khomein in the western Markazi province was shown ablaze late Thursday with crowds of jubilant protesters marching past, according to images posted on social media, verified by AFP.

The house was eventually turned into a museum commemorating Khomeini. It was not immediately clear what damage it sustained.

The protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police, pose the biggest challenge from the street to Iran’s leaders since the 1979 revolution.

They were fuelled by anger over the obligatory headscarf for women originally imposed by Khomeini but have turned into a movement calling for an end to the Islamic Republic itself.

Images of Khomeini have on occasion been torched or defaced by protesters, in taboo-breaking acts against a figure whose death is still marked each June with a holiday for mourning.

On Friday protesters chanted anti-regime slogans at the funeral of a young boy whose family says was killed by security forces, a rights group and monitors said.

Hundreds flocked to the city of Izeh in southwestern Iran for the funeral of Kian Pirfalak, aged nine or 10 according to activists, footage posted by the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) and monitor 1500tasvir showed