Iran’s President, Foreign Minister, and Others Killed in Helicopter Crash

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and several other officials perished in a helicopter crash in mountainous terrain near the Azerbaijan border, as confirmed by officials and state media on Monday (May 20).

Iranian state-run media announced Raisi’s death in a post on Monday, along with the deaths of Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and other government officials who were aboard the helicopter.

State-run media gave no immediate cause for the crash. However, the helicopter the group was traveling in crashed in foggy conditions in a mountainous area in the northwest of the country near the border with Azerbaijan. Raisi had taken part in a ceremony to inaugurate a dam with the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.

Bad weather hindered rescuers in their attempts to find the downed helicopter.

As the son of a cleric from Iran’s second-largest city, Mashhad, Raisi attended a seminary school from the age of 15 and took part in protests against the Western-backed Shah of Iran, who was toppled in the 1979 revolution that installed the theocratic regime under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Before becoming president in 2021, the ultraconservative had been the head of the judiciary.

A year after assuming the presidency, he ordered a crackdown on women’s dress codes. That led to the arrest of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, whose headscarf had not properly covered her hair, in line with the country’s “hijab and chastity” law. Amini’s death in custody sparked nationwide protests that resulted in hundreds of deaths, according to human rights groups, and were seen as one of the most serious threats to the Islamic regime since it came to power in the 1979 revolution.

Since those protests died down, the regime has recently launched a new crackdown on women’s dress codes, which human rights group Amnesty International has described as a “war on women.”

via: NPR

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