On June 27, 1981 the afternoon prayer had just finished when Ayatollah Khamenei approached the floor. The attendees were still sitting in their organized lines of prayer. Some individuals collected pieces of paper, on which people had written questions to be answered personally, by the Ayatollah.
Ayatollah Khamenei began with a preface until he came to this point he was saying: “Woman has been oppressed among all human societies, not only among Arabs. They would not let her study, nor would they allow her to be social, nor to gain knowledge in the political arena, or would it be possible to…”
Suddenly, a loud explosion was heard!
Ayatollah Khamenei, who was facing the crowd, dropped to the floor. The first bodyguard ran to his aid. The mosque was small, and that bodyguard alone tried to pull him out. The prayer Imam was standing in the middle, in shock. He spotted the radio recorder, which was now in two pieces; the bomb that was planted inside of it exploded.
As Ayatollah Khamenei was being transferred to the hospital, he would come to every few minutes; he was whispering something; he was saying his shahada. His lips and eyes moved only very slightly.
The bodyguard picked up his pager to enter a code. Their secret code was “the guardian of the seven”. “Center 50-50”, he paged on the alarm code, which meant the “guardian of the seven” was wounded. The man who was at the other end of the pager burst into tears.
They arrived at the back entrance of the hospital, where they brought a brancard patient trolley, which took Ayatollah Khamenei to the operation room.
The right side of his body was full of shrapnel and pieces of radio. A part of his chest had been completely burned. His right hand was swollen and wouldn’t function any longer. The bones in his shoulders and chest could easily be seen.
Suddenly one of the surgeons stopped working, took out his gloves and said, “he’s gone.” At that time his blood pressure was monitored at approximately zero. Another doctor asked him why he stopped working? His blood pressure began to rise gradually, and they all started operating again.
When the surgery was over, Ayatollah Khamenei had a breathing tube and could not speak. He had felt that his right hand could no longer work. The first thing he wrote, with his left hand, were two questions. The first, if any of his companions in the mosque had been injured. We replied, "no, everyone is fine."
After that he asked about himself. We said, your right hand may not work anymore. He said, “I won’t need the hand, it would suffice if my brain and tongue work.”
It was from then on that he could not move his right hand any longer, since then he does all his tasks, particularly the writings, with his left hand.
