MINAB, Iran (AP) — The sun set over this southern Iranian city, and Heydar Sadeghi was where he can be found almost every evening: on a bench next to the shattered remains of his grandson’s school. His face was soaked with tears.
A banner strung around the rubble showed the faces of children and teachers killed here by an American airstrike on February 28, the first day of the war on Iran. Among them are Sadeghi’s 11-year-old grandson Hami and the boy’s mother, Neda Salehizadeh.
“I searched the bodies for my kids, thinking maybe one would be among them,” Sadeghi said Monday evening as he recounted how he rushed to the school in the moments after the explosions. He called out their names, saying, “‘Come with me! I’ve come to get you.’ They weren’t there,” he said, weeping.
The Shajareh Tayyebeh school has become a place to wrestle with grief and preserve the memories of the dead. Here, relatives try to comprehend the incomprehensible — how around 120 of their children could be snuffed out, just after they’d been dropped off for a day of classes.
At least one US missile hit the school that morning in Minab, according to an Associated Press investigation, but there has been no final accounting of what happened. Iranian state media have said 168 people were killed in the strike, most of them children.
