Revolutionaries demolished Reza Shah's mausoleum in 1980 and could not find his body, and a mummified body turned up on the site in 2018

Reza Shah ruled Iran from 1925. He became the richest man in the country through forced sales and confiscations of estates, and on abdication he reportedly left his heir about £3 million and more than 3 million acres. When Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran in 1941, he abdicated for his son Mohammad Reza. He wanted to go to Canada; the British sent him to Mauritius and then Johannesburg, where he died on 26 July 1944. He was buried at the al-Rifa'i Mosque in Cairo and later brought home to a mausoleum at Rey, south of Tehran, and parliament named him "Reza Shah the Great" in 1950. After the 1979 revolution, demolition of the mausoleum began in April 1980 under the cleric Sadegh Khalkhali and took about twenty days. The revolutionaries did not find his remains. Empress Farah said in 2015 that "he is still buried there". On 23 April 2018 a mummified body was found during expansion work at the Shah Abdol-Azim shrine on the site. A Tehran council official called it "a possibility" that it was Reza Shah; the shrine called the claims a rumour. A council member later told BBC Persian the body was his and had been reburied in the same area^†. His grandson Reza Pahlavi lives in exile.