Dubai: As the world mourns the death of the Iranian twins, Laleh and Ladan Bijani, both named after flowers in Farsi, the doctor who adopted them has said he was afraid his daughters would never survive the surgery.

Though the operation to separate the twins was known to be extremely risky and was done at the insistence of the sisters, their father Dr Alireza Safaian is a bitter man as he awaits the bodies of his daughters to be flown in from Singapore.

"When they took them to Singapore I knew they would bring back their bodies, they took them there and killed them," said an inconsolable Safaian.

"We shared a house for 27 years and I feel a great emptiness," he said.

"I and my brother, who is a doctor in Germany, we told everyone that this separation surgery was impossible. Nobody would listen to us," he was quoted by Iranian media as saying.

The 29-year-old Bijani twins died on July 8, shortly after the surgeons at Singapore's Raffles Hospital separated their heads during an unprecedented separation surgery.

The twins, born in poverty, faced new challenges at every corner of their short life. Dadollah Bijani, their biological father and a farmer from Firouzabad in Southern Iran, spoke of how the sisters were kept in a local hospital for years under the care of US doctors, but then went missing during the confusion of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

He eventually tracked them down to Karaj, near the capital Tehran, where they had been adopted by Safaian.

PTI