The Bab was arrested, examined by the clergy, and held in remote fortresses in the northwest of Persia. In 1850, on the order of the authorities, he was brought to Tabriz and executed by firing squad in the public square, together with a young follower. Baha'i accounts relate that the first volley left him unharmed, cutting only the ropes that bound him, and that he was found afterward completing a conversation with a scribe before a second regiment carried out the sentence, an episode Baha'is hold as miraculous and non-Baha'i observers, including a Western witness, reported in more measured terms. He was thirty years old.
The persecutions that followed cost the lives of many thousands of Babis. The movement, bereft of its founder, eventually found its resolution in the claim of Baha'u'llah, whom the great majority of Babis came to accept as the promised one; from them the Baha'i Faith grew, while a small remnant, the Azalis, followed a rival claimant.
The Bab's remains were, after long concealment, brought at last to Mount Carmel above Haifa, where the golden-domed Shrine of the Bab is today, with the resting place of Baha'u'llah near Akka, one of the two holiest sites of the Baha'i world.