IRAN/SINGAPORE: IRANIAN CONJOINED TWINS LADEN AND LALEH BIJANI ARE BURIED SIDE BY SIDE BUT IN DIFFERENT GRAVES CLOSE TO THEIR PARENTS HOME IN LOHRASB

Record ID: 646507

  • Title: IRAN/SINGAPORE: IRANIAN CONJOINED TWINS LADEN AND LALEH BIJANI ARE BURIED SIDE BY SIDE BUT IN DIFFERENT GRAVES CLOSE TO THEIR PARENTS HOME IN LOHRASB
  • Date: 12th July 2003
  • Summary: (W4) SINGAPORE (FILE) (REUTERS) SV'S: TWINS WALKING OUT OF NEWS CONFERENCE
  • Embargoed: 27th July 2003 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: LOHRASB AND UNKNOWN LOCATION, IRAN / SINGAPORE
  • City:
  • Country: Singapore Iran, Islamic Republic of
  • Topics: Health
  • Reuters ID: LVAEMRNVLQ2RWMFMDG5GMO5Q15MF
  • Story Text: Iranian twins Ladan and Laleh Bijani have been buried side by side but in different graves as thousands mourned the conjoined sisters whose determination to lead separate lives touched people around the world.
    Mourners lined the hillsides and beat their chests on Saturday (July 12) 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.
    The two women were joined at the head, something that only occurs once in every two million live births. The sisters died on the operating table in Singapore on Tuesday (July 8) in the final stages of a lengthy and risky attempt to separate them.
    This kind of separation operation had never before been tried on adults.
    The surgeons who operated on the twins initially tried to convince them not to have an operation to separate their fused heads, but the women insisted.
    In an interview broadcast on Friday (July 11), Ben Carson, a U.S. doctor from the team, said he never thought the operation had a reasonable chance of success. He added that 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.
    Carson, who has performed three successful surgeries of infant conjoined twins, was one of three leading surgeons who along with two dozen specialists and 100 assistants conducted the 52-hour operation at Singapore's Raffles Hospital.
    The twins were determined to undergo the ill-fated surgery so they could live separate lives. Fused in life, they finally achieved their dream of separation only in death.
    "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," said their father Dadollah Bijani.
    Female Red Crescent workers tossed flowers onto the bodies as Laleh and Ladan were laid to rest.
    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.
    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.
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