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Helicopter carrying Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi has crashed
Iranian officials say a helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi and Iran’s foreign minister went down in heavy fog.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and other officials were killed in a helicopter crash in mountainous terrain near the Azerbaijan border, officials and state media announced Monday.
Raisi, 63, and Amirabdollahian, 60, were traveling in a convoy of three helicopters from Iran’s border with Azerbaijan in the country’s mountainous northwest after inaugurating a joint dam project. The helicopter went down in heavy fog in a remote area Sunday, and search operations were hindered by the fog, blizzard conditions and difficult terrain.
Raisi’s death is not expected to upend Iran’s domestic or foreign politics. But it does come at a time of raised international tensions and increases speculation over who will eventually replace Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Raisi was viewed as a possible successor to the 85-year-old cleric.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran warned that Raisi’s death could lead to deeper crackdowns on “civil society” in Iran.
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Developments
∎ Mohammad Mokhber, Iran’s vice president, was appointed acting president. Mokhber appointed Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani acting foreign minister. Iran declared five days of public mourning.
∎ Raisi and the rest of his traveling party were flying in a U.S.-made Bell 212 helicopter. Iran has not commented on any investigation into the crash. Iran’s Red Crescent published video footage showing rescue teams recovering bodies from the crash site.
∎ The deaths of Iran’s president and its top diplomat deprive the country of two senior politicians at a time when Iran and the broader region are on edge because of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and recent direct military exchanges between Iran and Israel that risked sparking a wider regional conflict. Domestically, Iran’s theocratic government has been facing anger over corruption, its sanctions-hit economy and calls for an end to clerical rule.
The helicopter was a Bell 212 model, Iran state media reported. It’s a civilian version of the Vietnam War-era “Twin Huey” that today is popular with governments and private helicopter companies around the world. Iranian media said the helicopter that went down was connected to the Islamic Republic Red Crescent Society, and experts suggested it may have been more than 40 years old.
Although the cause of the crash was still under investigation, former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blamed the crash on U.S. sanctions that make aviation replacement parts difficult to obtain in Iran.
It was built by Bell Helicopter, now Bell Textron, a division of Textron Inc., a Fortune 500 company based in Providence, Rhode Island. The helicopter, which seats about 15, was developed for the Canadian military in the late 1960s and introduced for civilian use a few years later. Non-military organizations that fly the Bell 212 include many U.S. law enforcement agencies and fire departments; Japan’s Coast Guard and Thailand’s national police among others.
The most recent fatal crash of a Bell 212 was in September 2023, when a privately operated aircraft crashed off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.
Iran’s air force and navy have 10 of the helicopters, according to FlightGlobal’s 2024 World Air Forces directory. It’s not clear how many the civilian government owns and flies.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Raisi’s death was “a great loss to the Iranian people” and that China had lost a good friend. Russia’s Vladimir Putin described Raisi as a “true friend of Russia” and an “outstanding politician.” European Council President Charles Michel said the EU “expressed its sincere condolences” to the families of all those killed.
Saudia Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz, whose country has seen tensions with Iran ease somewhat in recent months, extended “deepest sympathy” to the Iranian people.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and leaders of Hezbollah all offered their condolences, and Syria and Lebanon declaring three days of mourning.
The White House had no immediate comment on the deaths.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has the final say on all major policy decisions. However, according to Iran’s constitution, the vice president takes over if the president is not able to execute his duties because of illness or death. That means that power has been transferred temporarily to Mokhber, 68, who has been Raisi’s No. 2 since the election in 2021 that handed Raisi the presidency. Khamenei ordered Mokhber to work with the Iranian judiciary to arrange an election within 50 days. Hopefuls for the job must have their candidacies approved by Khamenei’s regime.
Mokhber is close to Khamenei, and like Raisi is a politically conservative hardliner when it comes to issues such as violating “morality” laws, clampdowns on protests and nuclear talks with the West. He hails from Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan Province on the Iraqi border and the Persian Gulf. He was a Revolutionary Guard Corps officer in the 1980s and is a former head of Setad, a powerful economic organization controlled by Khamenei. Setad, with its billions of dollars in assets, struggled to get effective COVID-19 vaccines to the masses − Iran was among the most hard-hit Middle East nations. The official death toll of almost 150,000 is believed to be much higher.
Setad and Mokhber were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2021, accused of violating “the rights of dissidents by confiscating land and property from opponents of the regime” among other things.
Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, urged the international community to remain vigilant and responsive to any potential escalation of the violent suppresion of peaceful dissent.
“Raisi was a pillar of a system that jails, tortures, and kills people for daring to criticize state policies,” Ghaemi said. “His death has enabled him to escape being held accountable for his many crimes and the state’s atrocities committed under his rule.”
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Mokhber will take over the presidency on an interim basis. New elections must be called within 50 days and Mokhber will be part of a three-person council tasked with organizing Iran’s next national vote.
“Real alternatives to Iran’s hardliners have simply not been allowed to stand for office in the last few elections,” said Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and the co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank.
Ebrahim Raisi ascended to the presidency after heading Iran’s judiciary.
He rose through the ranks to be Iran’s top legal official after working as a prosecutor assigned to cases connected to the Iran-Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988.
Activists started calling Raisi the “Butcher of Tehran” because he was one of four judges who allegedly oversaw the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners. Iran has never acknowledged these alleged killings, which Human Rights Watch estimates saw 2,800 to 5,000 people executed.
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“As deputy prosecutor general of Tehran, Raisi participated in a so-called ‘death commission’ that ordered the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988,” the U.S. Treasury Department said in a 2019 sanctions notice. When asked about the killings in 2021, Raisi described himself as a “defender of human rights.”
Not a lot. Some theories, mostly conspiratorial in nature and lacking evidence, have sprung up on social media.
There’s a tendency in Iran to blame Israel, its chief regional enemy, whenever there is an unexplained accident or death of a public security or nuclear official in Iran.
Tehran has so far been silent on this point. However, Israeli officials have already been anonymously briefing reporters there Monday, saying “it wasn’t us.”
Iran’s isolation from the world has long left it with one of the oldest civil-aviation fleets in the world, and it has facilitated a fatal trend in its aviation-safety record. Western manufacturers, under the sanctions, are prohibited from selling planes and even crucial spare parts to Iran. What’s not known is whether the U.S.-made Bell 212 crashed because of lack of access to spare parts or some other technical maintenance issue.
Contributing: Reuters
