Posted on 05/20/2024 1:20:14 AM PDT by Libloather
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed after a helicopter carrying him and other officials crashed in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran on Sunday.
Raisi, 63, was confirmed dead by Iranian media today along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian, Governor of Eastern Azerbaijan province Malek Rahmati and Tabriz's Friday prayer Imam Mohammad Ali Alehashem.
Two pilots and three other Iranian officials and security guards also perished in the crash.
Grainy drone footage from Iranian and Turkish news agencies showed how the helicopter had smashed apart on landing, and an Iranian official said the search teams who located the wreckage found 'no sign of life'.
Footage shared by the Iranian Red Crescent later this morning showed solemn rescuers carrying corpses on covered stretchers as they made their way through the forest from the crash site.
The nation's government held an 'urgent meeting' this morning, with Raisi's chair left vacant and covered in a black sash.
According to Iran's constitution, a new presidential election will need to be called within 50 days.
But Raisi's death is sure to trigger a power struggle, with a variety of ambitious candidates now set to vie for power.
Images circulated on social media showed Iranian citizens taking to the streets in mourning in the hours following the announcement of the president's death.
Raisi, who became president of Iran in 2021, was widely seen as a vassal for the regime and a yes man to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
He stormed to the presidency with a huge majority following the 2021 elections - but less than half of Iran's electorate turned out to vote after many more moderate candidates were barred from running.
As a young student at a religious seminary in the holy city of Qom, Raisi took part in protests against the Western-backed Shah...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Iran helicopter crash LIVE: Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi killed after aircraft plummets into mountain range - latest updates
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13437285/ebrahim-raisi-iran-helicopter-crash-live.html
Most likely?
Old Bell helicopter, or an Iranian copy.
Maybe should have spent more money on the choppers and less on rockets and missiles for Iranian proxies.
The Day the Music Died - Iranian style
Like Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant died in a modern up to date helicopter under similar weather conditions. President probably told the pilot fly me home or face the consequences. Karma is.
Yea, but Kobe’s helicopter did not get hit with a surface to air missile.
Some countries have all the luck!
And the crowd went wild, as the narrator of Rocky And Bullwinkle says.
OK so now we know what a “hard landing” is.
Now can someone tell me what the status of JFK’s “hard hitting headache” is.
Are you merely speculating, or are you asserting that this actually happened to the Iranian president’s helicopter?
That was William Conrad by the way.
Sometimes stupidity is a better explanation than conspiracy.
[The nation’s government held an ‘urgent meeting’ this morning, with Raisi’s chair left vacant and covered in a black sash.]
Has Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama applied for the position yet? It’s one of his pet projects as well.
May all 72 of his virgins look like Hillary and Chelsea.
Do they have a body to confirm? Asking for a friend.
I’m a fan of statistical probability. Out of a few hundred thousand helicopter trips this year, tens of thousands of which were in bad weather, the President of Iran is an unlikely accidental fatality.
When your number’s up, your number is up.’
If the diabolical joos can control the weather and terrain features, maybe the Iranians should stop running their gibbering mullahs.
What a darned shame.
I wonder if OJ was there to carry his bags on the other side.
He made his bones judging, torturing and killing Iranians. Lightly referred to in his post-mortem Western media bios as “ having a reputation for repression”
He led trials after the ‘88 Iran-Iraq war where any political prisoner suspected of disloyalty got a 3 question, 5 minute “ trial” before he decided if they lived or died. Thousands are estimated to have been executed.
Yesterday he faced the real supreme justice of the universe.
An excerpt
“Before becoming president in 2021, the ultraconservative had been the head of the judiciary.
A year after assuming the presidency, he ordered a crackdown on women’s dress codes. That led to the arrest of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, whose headscarf had not properly covered her hair, in line with the country’s “hijab and chastity” law. Amini’s death in custody sparked nationwide protests that resulted in hundreds of deaths, according to human rights groups, and were seen as one of the most serious threats to the Islamic regime since it came to power in the 1979 revolution.
Since those protests died down, the regime has recently launched a new crackdown on women’s dress codes, which human rights group Amnesty International has described as a “war on women.”
Raisi was known for his part in 1988 extrajudicial killings
The brutal repression of the protests was not the first time Raisi had been accused of ruthlessly crushing dissent. Rights groups have said that as a young prosecutor in 1988, he sat on what became known as “death committees” which ordered the execution of political prisoners.
Raisi sat on the panel in Tehran, which rights groups say ordered the execution of hundreds of enemies of the Islamic regime: Amnesty International estimates that nationwide, around 5,000 people were put to death.”
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