AFP – AUVERS-SUR-OISE – Iranian opposition members in exile attended the funeral Monday of Marzieh, a renowned singer and prominent opponent of Iran’s Islamic rulers, who died in Paris last week aged 86.
Marzieh, full name Ashraf Al-Sadat Mortezai, was a hugely popular singer in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s but stopped working after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. She died in hospital in Paris on Wednesday.
She left Iran in 1994, joining the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, the main faction in the Iranian NCRI resistance movement.
Among the hundreds of mourners on Monday was the NCRI’s president, Maryam Radjavi, who scattered on the singers’ grave sand from Ashraf, a camp in Iraq that is home to thousands of NCRI members.
”You stayed strong until the very end in the struggle against the mullahs’ regime,” said Jalal Ganjei, the cleric who led the funeral service for Marzieh in the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris.
Marzieh performed for dignitaries such as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the late presidents Charles de Gaulle of France and Richard Nixon of the United States. She sang at a concert in Paris as recently as 2006.