Iran: Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and the accompanying delegation died in a helicopter crash on Sunday while returning to Tabriz from the Khoda Afarin region as per the report of Iran’s Mehr News Agency. The bad weather made it difficult to find the crash site and complicated rescue efforts.
Along with Raisi, several high-ranking Iranian officials died in the helicopter crash in the Dizmar forest, which is in the East Azerbaijan region between the cities of Varzaqan and Jolfa.
At the time of the tragedy, Raisi and other officials were on their way back from an event with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan.
Representing hardline and conservative forces in Iranian politics, the 63-year-old served as president for over three years and was likely to seek reelection the following year.
Raisi, a former chief judge, was considered as an aspirant to the 85-year-old Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Raisi was born in Mashhad, a center of Shia Islam in northern Iran. He received religious instruction and training at the Qom seminary, where he studied under eminent academics like Khamenei.
Before moving to Tehran in 1985, Raisi gained expertise as a prosecutor in several different jurisdictions. Human rights organizations said that he was a member of a committee of judges in the capital city that oversaw the execution of political detainees.
The late president had a lengthy tenure on the Assembly of Experts, which selects the supreme leader’s successor in the case of the latter’s demise.
2014 saw him nominated by Khamenei to head the Astan Quds Razavi, which resulted in his two-year tenure as attorney general. With billions of dollars in assets, the enormous bonyad, or charitable trust, is in charge of looking after the shrine of the eighth Shia imam, Imam Reza.
Raisi first ran for president in 2017 in an attempt to unseat former president Hassan Rouhani, who stood for the centrist and moderate groups.
Appointed by Khamenei in 2019, Raisi was making headlines as the new head of the Iranian judiciary after a brief break. He campaigned on the platform of fighting corruption and defending justice, and he traveled across the provinces a lot to win over the populace.
Raisi was elected president in 2021 and seemed to have established a solid platform for reelection amid poor voter attendance and the widespread disqualification of moderate and reformist contenders.