Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have turned out in central Tehran to mourn the deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raishi and seven other officials who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday (19.5.24) in northwestern Iran.
Funeral services for Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday, will begin tomorrow Tuesday from the northwestern city of Tabriz, the official Irna news agency announced on Monday.
The funeral procession for the president and the persons who accompanied him on his trip will take place tomorrow morning at 09:30 (local time, 08:00 Greek time) in Tabriz and then the bodies will be transferred to Tehran, where the funerals will continue. ceremonies, the agency reported, citing Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei today expressed his condolences over the death of the country’s President Ibrahim Raishi and announced that First Vice President Mohammad Mohbar is acting as interim president and has 50 days to hold presidential elections, the official Iranian news agency reported. IRNA news agency.
💔🇮🇷 THOUSANDS are beginning to gather in Tehran to mourn the deaths of President Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian & the other lives lost. pic.twitter.com/9AA4zpb7aB
— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) May 20, 2024
Condolences from Iran’s allies
Iran’s allies were the first to express their condolences over Raisi’s death. Recep Tayyip Erdogan called him his brother and expressed his support for Iran.
Lebanon declared three days of mourning, while Hezbollah and the rest of the Axis of Resistance speak of a great loss of an important ally.
“These leaders supported the legitimate struggle of our people once morest the Zionists and provided valuable assistance to the Palestinian resistance,” Hamas said in a statement.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke of a true friend of Russia. “(The president) expressed his deep condolences for the plane tragedy that took the life of the country’s leadership,” the Kremlin spokesman said.
In one of the first reactions of the Israelis, an official who maintains his anonymity, hastened to declare that Israel has no involvement in what happened.
There is no evidence of deliberate action, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said, citing US intelligence officials.
Condolences were expressed by the EU leadership and France, while Iranian exiles gathered outside the Iranian embassy in London to celebrate Raishi’s death.
Who was Raisi?
Iran’s president Ebrahim Raishi, also known as the “butcher of Tehran” had imposed the strictest implementation of the “hijab and chastity law” restricting women’s freedoms.
A protĂ©gĂ© of Iran’s supreme leader for 35 years, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he was considered the favorite to succeed him in the Islamic Republic’s most important post.
Ayatollah Raishi was one of the pillars of the conservative and ultra-conservative camp that have put under their control all the levers of power in Iran since 2020.
He was elected on June 18, 2021, appearing as a protector of the underprivileged and an opponent of corruption. He won in an election battle with virtually no opponents and with a historically low participation of Iranians in the voting.
He succeeded the moderate Hassan Rouhani, who had defeated him in the 2017 presidential election and was ineligible to run once more following two consecutive presidential terms.
Ayatollah Raisi emerged strengthened from March’s parliamentary elections, the first elections held in Iran since the unprecedented wave of protest that rocked the country at the end of 2022 following the death of Mahsha Amini.
He hailed the election result as “a new historic defeat of Iran’s enemies”, i.e. Western countries and Iranian dissidents abroad. The parliament that will form a body on May 27 will be under the control of the conservatives and ultraconservatives of the Tehran regime.
“Butcher of Tehran”
Born in November 1960 in the holy Shiite city of Mashhad into a family of clerics, Ibrahim Raisi participated in the protests once morest the Shah as a seminary student in the holy city of Qom.
He was appointed at the age of 20 as the chief prosecutor of Karaz immediately following the Islamic revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power in 1979. He was the chief prosecutor of Tehran from 1989 to 1994 and vice president of the Judiciary from 2004 to 2014, when and was appointed attorney general of Iran.
In 2016, Ayatollah Khamenei installed him as head of the powerful Astan-Ă© Qods Razavi charity, which manages the mausoleum of Imam Reza in Mashhad along with vast industrial and real estate assets. Three years later he takes over the leadership of the country’s Judicial Authority.
As the chief prosecutor of the Iranian capital, Ebrahim Raisi earned the nickname “the butcher of Tehran” by participating in 1988, with the end of the Iran-Iraq war, on the Death Commission, the four-member secret court set up to retry thousands of political prisoners, many of who were members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq organization. Thousands, to tens of thousands, of political prisoners were then executed.
Raisi was asked in 2021 regarding the mass executions and replied: “If a judge, a prosecutor, has defended the safety of the people, he should be praised…I am proud to have defended human rights from every position I have held so far.”
In 2009, following the dubious 2009 presidential election that sparked a months-long wave of protest, Raisi supported the regime’s brutal crackdown and mass incarceration as the regime’s top judicial official.
In 2019, the US Treasury Department sanctioned him for his role in the domestic crackdown campaign.
His first concern following assuming the Iranian presidency in 2021 is dismantling the legacy of moderate President Rouhani, the 2015 international agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program that Iran signed in exchange for the easing of Western sanctions. Under Raisi, Tehran began enriching uranium close to nuclear-weapon-enable levels and refused international inspections.
Ayatollah Raishi supported the imposition of a stricter regime of observance and enforcement of Islamic rules on women’s dress, and at the end of 2022 he supported the brutal suppression of the protest movement sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for violating the Islamic dress code.
Ayatollah Raishi put his stamp on Tehran’s policy of taking Western or dual nationals as hostages and releasing them in exchange.
In recent months, he has supported the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas in every possible way in the war with Tehran’s eternal enemy Israel and justified the April 13 Iranian attack with drones and missiles once morest Israel.
The restoration of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in March 2023 was an isolated reprieve in Raishi’s otherwise aggressive foreign policy, manifested by supplying Russia with weapons once morest Ukraine, as well as actively supporting and equipping pro-Iranian players in the Middle East. , such as Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
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