Brian McDonald
A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi suffered a “hard landing” on Sunday, Iranian state media reported, without immediately providing further details.
Raisi was traveling through the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan. State TV said the incident happened near Jolfa, a town on the border with Azerbaijan, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Traveling with Raisi were Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials, state news agency IRNA reported. A local government official used the word “accident” to describe the incident, but acknowledged to an Iranian newspaper that he had not yet arrived at the scene.
Neither IRNA nor state TV offered any information on Raisi’s condition.
Rescue teams were trying to reach the site, state TV said, but were hampered by bad weather conditions. There were reports of heavy rain and fog with some wind. IRNA called the area a “forest”.
Office of the Iranian Presidency via AP
Raisi was in Azerbaijan on Sunday morning to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The dam is the third that the two nations have built on the Aras River. The visit took place despite cold relations between the two nations, including due to an armed attack on the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tehran in 2023, and Azerbaijan’s diplomatic relations with Israel, which Iran’s Shiite theocracy views as its main enemy in the region. .
Iran operates several helicopters in the country, but international sanctions make it difficult to obtain parts for them. Its military air fleet also largely dates back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Raisi, 63, is a hardliner who previously led the country’s judiciary. He is seen as a protégé of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and some analysts have suggested he could replace the 85-year-old leader upon his death or resignation.
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 US in part because of his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
In 2022, He said “60 Minutes” that the sanctions, implemented by former President Donald Trump and maintained by President Biden, are “tyrannical.”
“The new administration in the US claims it is different from the Trump administration,” Raisi told Lesley Stahl. “They said so in their messages to us. But we have not witnessed any change in reality.”
Under Raisi, Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections. Iran armed Russia in its war against Ukraine, as well as launching a massive drone and missile attack against Israel in the midst 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.
