Several Iranian media announced on the morning of Monday, May 20, the death of President Ebrahim Raïssi and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, in the crash the day before of their helicopter in the north-west of Iran. “The president of the Iranian people, hardworking and tireless (…), sacrificed his life for the nation,” the Iranian government confirmed in the morning.
The information was initially given by the Mehr agency and the government newspaper Iran Daily, after the discovery of the wreckage of the helicopter at dawn. The television broadcast religious songs on Monday morning and showed photos of the president.
“We assure the loyal nation that, with the help of God and the support of the people, there will not be the slightest disruption in the administration of the country,” the Iranian government assured. Vice President Mohammad Mokhber has been named Iran’s interim president, as the country observes five days of mourning. He must organize “the election of a new president within a maximum period of fifty days,” communicated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Initially, according to authorities, the helicopter carrying the Iranian president and the foreign minister had to make an emergency “hard landing” in a mountainous and rural area near the border between Iran and Iran. ‘Azerbaijan, according to several media outlets, including Tasnim News and Jam Jam Online, on Sunday.
It was during a return trip from Azerbaijan, where Ebrahim Raïssi met his counterpart Ilham Aliev on the occasion of the inauguration of a dam on the Araxe river, along the border with Azerbaijan, that the accident took place.
The rescue services, despite more than “twenty teams [sent] equipped with complete equipment, in particular drones and rescue dogs”, had great difficulty reaching the place where the aircraft crashed, while the weather was very cloudy and night had fallen in the region.
Monday morning, Iranian emergency services recovered the remains of President Raïssi and the eight other passengers from the helicopter. “We are in the process of transferring the bodies of the martyrs to Tabriz,” the large city in the northwest, the head of the Red Crescent, Pirhossein Koulivand, declared on state television, announcing the end of search operations.
In addition to the late president, the presence of Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian and the governor of the East Azerbaijan region, Malik Rahmati, as well as several other people in the helicopter, was mentioned by several Iranian media.
After the announcement of the disappearance of the helicopter on Sunday, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev, to whom President Raisi had visited a few hours earlier, offered his help to Iran. Turkey, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was “deeply saddened” by the helicopter accident, announced that it had deployed 32 rescue workers and several vehicles.
Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival, expressed in a press release its “great concern” after the disappearance of the device, offering its help to Iran to find it. Same gesture for Russia, which announced on Sunday evening that it would send a team of around fifty rescuers as well as a helicopter and several all-terrain vehicles to the region of the accident. For its part, the European Union announced that it had activated its Copernicus satellite mapping system to help Iran find the device.
At the official announcement of the death of Ebrahim Raïssi, and eight other occupiers, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed a “remarkable politician” and a “true friend” of Russia “[having] made an invaluable personal contribution to the development of relations (…) between our countries and has made great efforts to bring them to the level of strategic partnership,” in a press release.
“I extend my sincere condolences to his family and the people of Iran,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on X, adding that India stands “with Iran in this moment of sadness.” Its neighbor Pakistan, and bordering Iran, “will observe a day of mourning and the flag will be at half mast” in “solidarity with Iran”, a “brother” country, wrote the Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, on , while Islamabad welcomed the Iranian leader with great fanfare at the end of April.
As for Lebanese Hezbollah, supported by Iran, the armed Shiite movement pays tribute to the “protector of resistance movements”. Same tribute paid by Hamas, which welcomes “support for the Palestinian resistance”.
Always wearing a black turban and dressed in a religious cloak, the Iranian president has led Iran since 2021 in a troubled context abroad and internal protest. Aged 63, Ayatollah Raïssi was considered an ultraconservative and an outspoken supporter of order.
Born in November 1960, Mr. Raisi had risen through the ranks of the judicial system for three decades, having been appointed prosecutor general of Karaj, near Tehran, at just 20 years old, in the wake of the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was then prosecutor general of Tehran from 1989 to 1994, then deputy head of the judicial authority from 2004 to 2014, the year of his appointment as prosecutor general of the country.
In 2016, Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei placed him at the head of the powerful charitable foundation Astan-e Quds Razavi, which manages the mausoleum of Imam-Reza in Mashhad as well as an immense industrial and real estate heritage. Three years later, he took over as head of the judicial authority.
Having presented himself as the champion of the disadvantaged classes and the fight against corruption, Mr. Raïssi was elected on June 18, 2021 in the first round of a vote marked by an unprecedented abstention for a presidential election, and the absence of strong competitors. He succeeded the moderate Hassan Rouhani, who beat him in the 2017 presidential election and could no longer run again after two consecutive terms.
Mr. Raïssi emerged strengthened from the legislative elections held in March and mid-May, the first national election since the protest movement which shook Iran at the end of 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for failing to comply with the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.
The Iranian president then welcomed “a new historic failure inflicted on Iran’s enemies after the riots” of 2022. Parliament, which will take office on May 27, will be largely under the control of the conservative and ultraconservatives, who support his government.
In recent months, Mr. Raïssi had presented himself as a resolute adversary of Israel, the sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic, by supporting the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas since the start, on October 7, of the war that Israel delivers him to the Gaza Strip.
He thus justified the unprecedented attack launched by Iran on April 13 against Israel, with 350 drones and missiles, most of which were intercepted with the help of the United States and several other allied countries. Mr. Raïssi was on the American blacklist of Iranian officials sanctioned for “complicity in serious human rights violations”, accusations dismissed as null and void by the authorities in Tehran.
