While awaiting the results of the investigation, Iran buries filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui who died of stabbing

Many Iranian filmmakers and artists attended the funeral in Tehran on Wednesday of director Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, stabbed to death on Saturday in mysterious conditions, according to local media.

Jafar Panahi, Massoud Kimiaï, Mohammad Rasoulof and Bahman Farmanara were among the filmmakers who gathered in front of the large Roudaki performance hall in central Tehran for a final tribute to Dariush Mehrjui. This pioneer of the advent of Iranian cinema, author of The Cow in 1969, was stabbed to death at the age of 83, Saturday evening with his wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, a 54-year-old screenwriter, at their home in Karaj, west of the Iranian capital.

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The police arrested ten individuals as part of their investigation, said the legal agency Mizan Online, without providing details on the circumstances and motives of this double murder. During the funeral, the director's daughter, Mona Mehrjui, thanked the crowd who came to attend the ceremony. “As my father said, the assassins are truly among us,” she added. Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi announced on Sunday that “clues” had “been found” and that the police were continuing the investigation “seriously”. On Wednesday, he ruled out any “link between the murder of Mehrjui and the serial assassinations” of dissident intellectuals in November 1998 committed by the country's secret police. These crimes had been attributed by the government to “uncontrolled elements” of the Ministry of Intelligence, who were sentenced to prison terms of up to life.

Since his death, tributes have multiplied to salute the work of Dariush Mehrjui, considered one of the greatest representatives of Iranian cinema having been a director, producer and screenwriter for six decades during which he was confronted with the censorship before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The couple was buried in the artists' section of the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran, according to the Irna agency.