The helicopter crash that killed Iran\u2019s president and foreign minister has sent shock waves around the region. Iranian state media said on Monday that President Ebrahim Raisi, the country\u2019s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, and others have been found dead at the site after an hourslong search through a foggy, mountainous region of the country\u2019s northwest.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what we know so far.<\/p>\n
The helicopter was carrying Raisi, Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran\u2019s East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. Raisi was returning on Sunday after travelling to Iran\u2019s border with Azerbaijan to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijan\u2019s President Ilham Aliyev when the crash happened in the Dizmar forest in Iran\u2019s East Azerbaijan province, under circumstances that remain unclear.<\/p>\n
Iranian officials have said the mountainous, forested terrain and heavy fog impeded search-and-rescue operations, which began on Sunday. The president of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir-Hossein Koulivand, said 40 search teams were on the ground despite \u201cchallenging weather conditions.\u201d Because of the bad weather, it was \u201cimpossible to conduct aerial searches\u201d via drones, Koulivand said, according to IRNA.<\/p>\n
Early on Monday, Turkish authorities released what they described as drone footage showing what appeared to be a fire in the wilderness that they \u201csuspected to be wreckage of a helicopter.\u201d The coordinates listed in the footage put the fire some 20 kilometres south of the Azerbaijan-Iranian border on the side of a steep mountain.<\/p>\n
Footage released by IRNA showed what the agency described as the crash site, across a steep valley in a green mountain range. Soldiers speaking in the local Azeri language said: \u201cThere it is, we found it.\u201d Shortly after, state TV in an on-screen scrolling text said: \u201cThere is no sign of life from people on board.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raisi was seen as a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to Iran\u2019s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a potential successor for his position within the country\u2019s Shiite theocracy. Under the Iranian constitution, if a president dies, the country\u2019s first vice president \u2013 in this case, Mohammad Mokhber \u2013 would become president. Khamenei has publicly assured Iranians that there would be \u201cno disruption to the operations of the country\u201d as a result of the crash.<\/p>\n
After the news first broke of the search operation, countries including Russia, Iraq and Qatar made formal statements of concern about Raisi\u2019s fate and offered to assist in the search. Azerbaijani President Aliyev offered any support necessary. Relations between the two countries have been chilly due to Azerbaijan\u2019s diplomatic relations with Israel, Iran\u2019s regional arch-enemy.<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia, traditionally a rival of Iran although the two countries have recently made a rapprochement, said it stands by \u201cIran in these difficult circumstances.\u201d There was no immediate official reaction from Israel. Last month, following an Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus that killed two Iranian generals, Tehran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel. They were mostly shot down and tensions have apparently since subsided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The helicopter crash that killed Iran\u2019s president and foreign minister has sent shock waves around the region. Iranian state media\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":44699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10371,14174,1380,8036,535,12992,13128,1418,536,14187],"class_list":["post-44698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-condolences","tag-east-azerbaijan-province","tag-gaza","tag-helicopter-crash","tag-iran","tag-iranian-foreign-minister-hossein-amir-abdollahian","tag-iranian-president-ebrahim-raisi","tag-israel-hamas-war","tag-palestine","tag-rescue-operation"],"reading_time":"3 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/usa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}