Helicopter carrying Iran's hardline president apparently crashes in mountainous region – AP explains

(19 May 2024)
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RESTRICTION SUMMARY:

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Dubai, United Arab Emirates – 19 May 2024
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1. SOUNDBITE (English) Jon Gambrell, AP News Director for the Gulf and Iran:
“Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has apparently been involved in a helicopter crash in the country’s far northwest. This crash also involves the Iranian foreign minister and other officials who were riding along with Raisi, after a trip to the Azerbaijan border to inaugurate a dam there. Now, Raisi is a hard-liner who was elected in 2021. He’s known as a protege of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei and has been discussed as a future supreme leader himself. Raisi, while he doesn’t have the final say on state matters, has continued Iran’s hard-line rhetoric towards the West. He has backed Iran’s moves to enrich uranium up to nearly weapons-grade levels. He also has been linked to the security force crackdowns that we’ve seen after the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini that saw hundreds of thousands of protesters in the street and then hundreds killed and then tens of thousands arrested in the time afterwards. Now, Raisi is also known for the execution of thousands of prisoners back in 1988 at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. has sanctioned Raisi over that and over his other involvement in cases that they say saw human rights abuses while he was the head of the judiciary. Moving forward, just given what we’ve seen so far, Iranian state television has just aired hours of people praying at shrines across the country showing how seriously they take this incident. But as of this moment, it remains unclear what Raisi’s fate is.”
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STORYLINE:
A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials apparently crashed in the mountainous northwest reaches of Iran on Sunday, sparking a massive rescue operation in a fog-shrouded forest as the public was urged to pray.

The likely crash came as Iran under Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel last month and has enriched uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.

Iran has also faced years of mass protests against its Shiite theocracy over an ailing economy and women’s rights — making the moment that much more sensitive for Tehran and the future of the country as the Israel-Hamas war inflames the wider Middle East.

Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. State TV said what it called a “hard landing” happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with the nation of Azerbaijan, some 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran. Later, state TV put it farther east near the village of Uzi, but details remained contradictory.

Traveling with Raisi were Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. One local government official used the word “crash,” but others referred to either a “hard landing” or an “incident.”

Neither IRNA nor state TV offered any information on Raisi’s condition in the hours afterward. However, hard-liners urged the public to pray for him. State TV later aired images of the faithful praying at Imam Reza Shrine in the city of Mashhad, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest sites, as well as in Qom and other locations across the country. State television’s main channel aired the prayers nonstop.

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