Iran’s president killed in helicopter crash

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has died in a helicopter crash in a mountainous region of the country.

Rescuers on Monday found the helicopter that had carried the president and other officials, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, who also died, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported. It crashed on Sunday near the village of Tavil in northwestern Iran.

Raisi was returning from an event on the border with Azerbaijan in three helicopters when his plane crashed with nine people on board, all of whom died. There was thick fog in the region, making conditions difficult for rescue workers. The other two helicopters landed safely.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said intelligence agencies had told him there was no evidence of foul play in the helicopter crash, NBC reported.

The president’s death comes at a time of unrest in the Middle East as war rages between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The conflict has brought Iran, which backs the Islamist militant group, and Israel closer to full-scale conflict and led to other Tehran-backed groups, including the Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq, targeting ships around the Red Sea and attack bases in the USA.

In April, Iran launched an unprecedented barrage of missiles and drones against Israel, its arch-enemy, but almost all of them were intercepted and caused little damage. The Jewish state responded with a limited attack on an air base in Iran.

Although tensions between the two countries have now eased, they are still high as the Israeli military is in its eighth month of fighting a war to destroy Hamas – which is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

Raisi, an ultra-conservative cleric in his 60s who won the 2021 presidential election, was considered the favorite to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who is in his 80s.

His successor is likely to be First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, who has represented Iran on numerous foreign trips recently and who, like many senior Iranian officials, has been subject to US sanctions. According to the constitution, the elections are expected to take place within 50 days.

Raisi’s death will “not seriously affect Iran’s internal stability as the security forces, army and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain under the supreme leader’s control,” Gregory Brew, an analyst at Eurasia, said in a note. The IRGC is a powerful military and economic power and controls many of Iran’s relationships with proxy militias.

Both Raisi and Amirabdollahian oversaw the restoration of Iran’s diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia through a China-brokered deal in March 2023. But it was also a time when there was also a stalemate in negotiations to revive Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers such as the United States and the lifting of Western economic sanctions.

Iranian television had previously broadcast live footage of numerous ambulances in heavy rain and fog. The Turkish Defense Ministry said it had dispatched a drone to help locate and monitor the crash site in response to a request from Iran. The EU helped by activating its Rapid Deployment Mapping Service.

Raisi met his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev early Sunday to inaugurate a jointly developed dam on the border between the two countries.

Human rights groups accused the Iranian president of being instrumental in the mass execution of thousands of political dissidents in the late 1980s. In 2018, London-based Amnesty International said he chaired a “death commission” and called on the United Nations to investigate him for crimes against humanity.