Together in death

Their quest had taken them far from their parents at a young age, to Germany and finally to Singapore, where they underwent a complex surgery knowing it could kill one or both of them. As the separation was coming to a close, a lot of blood was lost. Ladan died first and Laleh hours later.

Although they’d planned to live together if the surgery was successful, they dreamed of independence and pursuing their own careers. Ladan wanted to be a lawyer, Laleh a journalist.

The sisters were born into a poor family of 11 children in Firouzabad, southern Iran. They were raised by doctors in Tehran, under the spotlight of the Iranian media.

Despite spending every minute together, the sisters displayed strong, distinct personalities from a young age. Ladan was talkative and enjoyed cooking — something Laleh, known as a quiet thinker, didn’t enjoy. Laleh loved animals, but Ladan chose to avoid them.

‘‘We have different ideas about our lives,’’ Laleh said last month, explaining why they needed to be separated. ‘‘Actually, we are opposites,’’ Ladan interrupted, laughing.

As schoolgirls, they cheated on tests by whispering answers to each other. The government caught on and concluded it would be nearly impossible for the sisters to compete individually in university entrance exams — so it granted them a joint scholarship to study law at Tehran University in 1994.

Despite Laleh’s dream of becoming a journalist, she agreed to study law to help Ladan’s ambition to be a lawyer. But the sisters took six-and-a-half years instead of the usual four.

Their hopes were high in 1996 when Iranian doctors helped them travel to Germany for tests ahead of possible surgery. But they returned heartbroken after doctors told them the operation was too dangerous because the sisters shared a common vein that drained blood from their brains. Yesterday, surgeons in Singapore believed they’d overcome that problem after creating a new vein for Ladan.

Their hopes were rekindled after they heard about Dr Keith Goh in Singapore leading a team that separated 18-month-old Nepalese twins. An AP reporter in Tehran helped the sisters contact Goh last year.

The pair had hoped to move back to Iran and live in an apartment together while they pursued different careers and caught up on experiences they felt they’d missed, said Bahar Niko, a school teacher who became a confidant to the sisters since they arrived here. Singapore’s small Iranian community quickly became a surrogate family for the twins and they began studying English.

The news of their death plunged Iran into grief, reports Reuters from Tehran.

Their father Dadollah Bijani, a poor farmer from southern Iran, recounted how the sisters kept in a local hospital for years went missing during the confusion of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

He tracked them down to Karaj, near Tehran, where they had been adopted by doctor Alireza Safaian. Despite a court ruling, the twins decided to stay with Safaian. ‘‘I see them everywhere in my house, I feel their warmth and kindness, I miss them,’’ he was quoted as saying by Etemad newspaper.