Helicopter carrying Iranian president crashes

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials apparently crashed Sunday in the mountainous regions of northwest Iran, triggering a massive rescue operation in a fog-shrouded forest as the public was urged to pray.

The likely accident occurred as Iran, under Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month launched an unprecedented drone and missile attack on Israel and enriched uranium more closer to military grade levels than ever before.

Iran has also faced years of massive protests against its Shiite theocracy over a struggling economy and women’s rights – making the moment all the more sensitive for Tehran and the country’s future that the war between Israel and Hamas is inflaming the Middle East as a whole.

Raisi was traveling in the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan. State television said what it called a “hard landing” occurred near Jolfa, a town on the border with Azerbaijan, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran. State television later reported it further east, near the village of Uzi, but the details remained conflicting.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards were traveling with Raisi, the official IRNA news agency reported. One local government official used the word “crash,” but others referred to either a “hard landing” or an “incident.”

Neither IRNA nor state television provided information on Raisi’s condition in the hours that followed. However, hardliners urged the public to pray for him. State television broadcast images of hundreds of worshipers, some with their hands outstretched in supplication, praying at the Imam Reza shrine in the city of Mashhad, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam, as well as in Qom and other places in the country. State television’s main channel broadcast the prayers continuously.

In Tehran, a group of men kneeling on the side of the street clasped prayer beads and watched a video of Raisi praying, some of them visibly crying.

“If anything happens to him, we will be heartbroken,” said one of the men, Mehdi Seyedi. “May the prayers work and he returns safely to the arms of the nation.”

In comments broadcast on state television, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said: “The esteemed president and his company were on their way home in helicopters and one of the helicopters was forced to made a hard landing due to bad weather and fog. »

“Several rescue teams are on their way to the area, but due to bad weather and fog, it may take time for them to reach the helicopter. »

IRNA has described the region as “forest” and the region is also known to be mountainous. State television broadcast images of SUVs driving through a wooded area and said they were hampered by poor weather conditions, including heavy rain and wind. Rescuers could be seen walking through the fog and mist.

A rescue helicopter tried to reach the area where authorities believe Raisi’s helicopter was located, but it was unable to land due to heavy fog, the spokesperson told IRNA Emergency Services, Babak Yektaparast. Late in the evening, Turkey’s Defense Ministry announced that it had sent an unmanned aerial vehicle and was preparing to send a helicopter with night vision capabilities to join search and rescue efforts.

Well after sunset, Iranian government spokesperson Ali Bahadori Jahromi acknowledged that “we are going through difficult and complicated conditions” in the research.

“The people and the media have the right to be informed of the latest news regarding the president’s helicopter crash, but given the coordinates of the incident location and the weather conditions, there is ‘no’ news so far,” he said. » wrote on the social platform »

Khamenei himself also urged the public to pray.

“We hope that Almighty God will bring the dear president and his colleagues back in good health into the arms of the nation,” Khamenei said, drawing an “amen” from the faithful he was addressing.

Raisi, 63, a hardliner who once ran the country’s justice system, is considered a Khamenei protégé and some analysts have suggested he could replace the 85-year-old leader after Khamenei’s death or resignation .

Raisi was on the border with Azerbaijan on Sunday morning to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. This is the third dam built by the two nations on the Aras River. This visit took place despite cold relations between the two countries, notably following a gun attack on the Azerbaijani embassy in Tehran in 2023, and Azerbaijan’s diplomatic relations with Israel, which the Iranian Shiite theocracy considers it its main enemy in the region.

Iran flies various helicopters in the country, but international sanctions make it difficult to obtain spare parts. Its military air fleet also largely dates back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. IRNA published images described as Raisi taking off in what looks like a Bell helicopter, with blue and white paint previously seen in published photographs.

Raisi won Iran’s 2021 presidential election, a vote that saw the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic. Raisi is sanctioned by the United States in part for his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq War.

Under Raisi, Iran now enriches uranium to levels close to weapons manufacturing and obstructs international inspections. Iran has armed Russia in its war against Ukraine and launched a massive drone and missile attack on Israel as part of its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It also continued to arm proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, mass protests have raged across the country for years. The most recent involved the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had previously been arrested for not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, at the discretion of authorities. The months-long security crackdown following the protests killed more than 500 people and led to more than 22,000 being arrested.

In March, a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that Iran was responsible for the “physical violence” that led to Amini’s death.

President Joe Biden was briefed by his aides on the Iranian crash, but administration officials have learned little more than what is publicly reported by Iranian state media, a senior official said of the administration, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. .

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Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report.