Araz News: Photographs of homeless people sleeping in empty graves outside Iran’s capital shocked even the country’s president and pointed to the continuing economic struggles gripping the nation on Wednesday 28 Dec.

The story and the haunting images of the homeless staring into the camera from inside the unused grave slots spread quickly on social media, where users and celebrities reacted with expressions of alarm and sadness.

Oscar-Winner Asghar Farhadi has written to President Hassan Rouhani decrying the fact that 50 males, females and underage homeless people were discovered sleeping in open graves in Baghestan Cemetery in Shahriar, west of Tehran, because they had nowhere else to go.

“The name of one of the people who sleeps in bone-crushing freezing cold and lives in death, as the reporter says, is Arman [Ideal],” wrote Farhadi in an open letter to the president today. “I can’t stop thinking about this name. We have found our lost ‘Ideals’ in graves. Shame on us!”

“Today, I read a shocking report about men, women and children who are living in graves of a cemetery near Tehran in these cold nights and now I am full of shame and have tears in my eyes,” Farhadi wrote.

By-wtop