PARIS, France - Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will likely live only two more years, the French daily Le Figaro reported on Saturday, citing intelligence sources.
The paper wrote that Khamenei’s prostate cancer has reached stage four and has started to spread to the rest of his body, according to Western intelligence sources.
The 76-year-old leader was admitted to hospital last September for cancer treatment.
Le Figaro’s report raises the question of Khamenei’s successor, and a possible power struggle among Iran’s top political and religious leaders after his death.
Iranian state media have regularly published pictures of the all-powerful supreme leader on his hospital bed and under surgery.
Analysts believe that the publication of his health condition has Khamenei’s own approval.
Shortly after he was admitted to hospital last year, Iran’s former Intelligence Minister Ghorbanali Dari Najaf Abadi said in a public speech: “In any case, we have to start thinking about the era after him (Khamenei).”
Khamenei was elected Supreme leader in 1989 by the country’s powerful Council of Experts after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Since then, Khamenei has tightly controlled the political, economic and military nerve system of Iran.
In an interview with the Jomhouri Eslami newspaper earlier this month, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani hinted that it wasn’t going to be easy to find a replacement, because of Khamenei’s decades-long control of the country’s affairs.
“If Ayatollah Khamenei died tomorrow, is there someone with the same revolutionary background and full knowledge of the country’s affairs, especially the armed forces, to replace him?” he was quoted as saying.
Rafsanjani told the newspaper that the creation of a “revolutionary assembly” might be better for running the country, instead of finding a successor to the supreme leader.
Khamenei is believed to have been suffering from prostate cancer for years and reports say that a special hospital has been built inside his residence compound for his treatment.
