The Kurdish poet and writer Celal Melekşa has died at the age of 69.
The funeral of Melekşa was followed by a mass ceremony which hundreds of people attended. At the funeral mourners recited his poems and sang Kurdish songs.
Celal Melekşa was born in Sine in 1951 and started to write poetry when he was still a child. He was known as a “person of peace and a poet who would not succumb to cruelty”.
After the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the leadership of Khamenei, Melekşa, who was imprisoned many times for his poems, gave up writing in Persian and spent his life developing Kurdish literature.