* Vice-President Mohammad Mokhber will assume powers as according to the Iranian Constitution
* Until an election is held within a maximum period of 50 days
Reported by Al Jazeera, Reuters, The Washington Post
Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi, 63, has been confirmed dead after a helicopter carrying him, his Foreign Minister Amirabdollahian and other officials crashed in a mountainous and forested area of the country in poor weather.
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State media gave no immediate cause for the crash but all nine people on board the helicopter died when it crashed on Monday in Iran’s northwestern East Azerbaijan region, state media said.
Raisi and Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian were traveling back from a meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The helicopter disappeared from radar on Sunday afternoon.
International media reports that Vice-President Mohammad Mokhber will assume powers as according to the Iranian Constitution, in case of the president’s death or incapacity, the first vice president will take over until an election is held within a maximum period of 50 days.
“The president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi, had an accident while serving and performing his duty for the people of Iran and was martyred,” Iran’s Mehr news agency said.
The 63-year-old hard-liner was widely seen as a protégé and confidant of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
Raisi was elected president in 2021 after a decorated career as an ultraconservative in Iran’s judiciary. He’d been seen as a potential successor to Khamenei.
In three years as president, Raisi oversaw a tightening of so-called morality laws governing women’s dress, a deadly crackdown on anti-government protests, efforts to expand Iran’s regional influence and, this year, the country’s first direct attack on Israel.
He had been a fixture of Iran’s hard-line establishment since his young adulthood. Born in the northeast Iranian city of Mashhad, he was a teenager at the onset of the Iranian Revolution.
At 20, he was appointed prosecutor in the city of Karaj. In the ensuing years, he worked his way up through Iran’s judicial system, defending the nascent Islamic Republic against opponents.
He served as a prosecutor for Tehran, as head of the anti-corruption General Inspection Office and as prosecutor general of the Special Court for the Clergy.
Raisi eventually rose to one of the most powerful roles in government: head of the judiciary. There, he cultivated an image as an anti-corruption leader while also working to purge opponents of the regime.
Human rights groups linked him to politically motivated executions and unjust imprisonments.
Amnesty International said Raisi was a “member of the ‘death commission’” that on Khomeini’s orders “forcibly disappeared” and executed thousands of dissidents in prisons near Tehran in 1988 as Iran’s war with Iraq was winding down.
Asked about those allegations, Raisi told reporters: “If a judge, a prosecutor has defended the security of the people, he should be praised. … I am proud to have defended human rights in every position I have held so far.”
His alleged involvement in the deaths of thousands of people, rights groups say, has increased his appeal among conservative Iranian voters.
The U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on Raisi in 2019 for being a political appointee of the Iranian supreme leader, whose network the Treasury Department said has “oppressed the Iranian people, exported terrorism, and advanced destabilizing policies around the world.”
Raisi was “involved in the regime’s brutal crackdown” on Green Movement protests following the chaotic 2009 election, and he participated in the “so-called ‘death commission’” in 1988, Treasury officials said.
Raisi’s victory in the 2021 presidential election over Hassan Rouhani, the relatively moderate incumbent, handed elected leadership back to hard-liners, enabling a stunning consolidation of power.
The result was not a surprise; Raisi was seen as Khamenei’s candidate, and the clerical establishment moved to promote his election and impede challengers.
Raisi, like Khamenei, adhered to a severe interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence as the basis for the state and government. Rouhani’s government signed the 2015 nuclear accord with world powers including the United States.
Raisi, in contrast, has been loath to engage diplomatically with the United States or the rest of the West. He inherited a country facing several crises, including the coronavirus pandemic, unrest and flashes of anti-government protests, an economy crushed under sanctions, a spreading conflict with Israel and a deadlock in negotiations with world powers over the revival of the nuclear deal.
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The death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman detained for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code for women, ignited a popular uprising, one of the most serious challenges to the clerical establishment since the 1979 revolution.
Thousands of Iranians, led by women and young people, mobilized to voice discontent over repression and economic neglect. The government, led by Raisi, responded by sending security forces to brutally suppress the protests, killing hundreds and injuring and arresting thousands, according to rights groups.
Iran has been engaged in a decades-long shadow war with Israel, which escalated in April when Iran made its first direct military assault on the Jewish state, launching more than 300 missiles and drones.
The attack was retaliation, Iran said, for an Israeli airstrike on a diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, that killed senior Iranian commanders.
The Iranian barrage, 99% of which Israel said was intercepted, appeared to serve as a show of force and an off-ramp to avoid widening the Middle East conflict as Israel wages war in Gaza.
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