Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has been killed in a helicopter crash in a mountainous area of the country.
Rescuers on Monday found the helicopter that had been carrying 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 Tavil village in northwest Iran.
Raisi was returning from an event on the border with Azerbaijan in a party of three helicopters when his craft went down with nine people on board, all of who died. There was dense fog in the region, making conditions difficult for rescue teams. The other two helicopters landed safely.
US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said intelligence agencies had informed him there is no evidence of foul play in the helicopter crash, NBC reported.
The president’s death comes at a time of turmoil in the Middle East as the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas rages. The conflict has edged Iran, which backs the Islamist militant group, and Israel closer to all-out conflict and led to other Tehran-supported groups, including the Houthis in Yemen and Shiite militias in Iraq, to attack ships around the Red Sea and US bases.
In April, Iran launched an unprecedented barrages of missiles and drones at Israel, its sworn enemy, though they were almost all intercepted and caused little damage. The Jewish state reacted with a limited strike on an air base in Iran.
While tensions between the two countries have since eased, they’re still high with the Israeli military in its eighth month of a war to destroy Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the US and European Union.
Raisi, an ultraconservative cleric in his 60s who won a presidential election in 2021, had been seen as a favorite to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and who’s in his 80s.
He’s likely to be succeed by first Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, who has represented Iran on many recent overseas trips and who like many senior Iranian officials is subject to US sanctions. Elections will probably be held within 50 days, as per the constitution.
Raisi’s death won’t “seriously disrupt Iran’s internal stability, as security forces, the army and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain under the control” of the supreme leader, Gregory Brew, an analyst at Eurasia, said in a note. The IRGC is a powerful military and business force and controls many of Iran’s relations with the proxy militias.
Both Raisi and Amirabdollahian oversaw the restoration of Iran’s diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia through a Chinese-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 including the US and lift Western economic sanctions.
Iranian television earlier aired live footage of scores of ambulances amid heavy rain and fog. The Turkish ministry of defense said it had dispatched a drone in response to a request from Iran to help locate and monitor the crash site. The EU helped by activating its rapid response mapping service.
Raisi met his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev to inaugurate a jointly developed dam on the border between the two countries early on Sunday.
The Iranian president was accused by rights groups of being instrumental in the mass execution of thousands of political dissidents in the late 1980s. In 2018, London-based Amnesty International said he presided over a “death commission” and called on the United Nations to investigate him for crimes against humanity.
