Iran has declared five days of public mourning after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in north-west Iran alongside seven others, including Tehran’s foreign minister.
The crash happened close to Iran’s border with Azerbaijan, where Raisi had been meeting President Ilham Aliyev
Raisi’s funeral will take place tomorrow, and for the next seven days cultural activities have been cancelled.
Mohammad Mokhber has been appointed as acting president, and Bagheri Kani, who was deputy foreign minister, is now foreign minister.
In the West, leaders from the EU, Nato and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) offered their condolences as Iran mourns its fallen leaderIran-backed groups Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, who are proscribed as terrorist organisations by many countries in the world, have also expressed their condolences to the people of Iran
The cause of the helicopter crash remains unclear, but Russia (Tehran’s close ally) has offered its help with the investigation
Interim President Mokhber has already addressed a cabinet meeting in Tehran, but standard procedure dictates that new elections are expected to be held in the next 50 days
Raisi’s death has stirred a range of reactions across the world, from protesters gathering outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin to flags flying at half-mast in Moscow, Beirut and elsewhere
.Amir-Abdollahian, the 60-year-old foreign minister of the Islamic Republic who died in the helicopter crash alongside President Raisi, spent the last two decades as a diplomat and foreign policy advisor to senior officials of the regime.
He led the Iranian diplomatic team that entered direct dialogue with US officials in Iraq in August 2007. The leader of Iran trusted him enough to allow a limited three-way conversation with the Americans and Iraqis on the subject of Iraq’s security and future.
He was later appointed as deputy foreign minister in the administration of then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A post he kept when Hassan Rouhani came to power in 2013 and appointed Mohammad Javad Zarif as foreign minister.Zarif led the talks with the Americans which resulted in the inking of the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, and he also fired Amir-Abdollahian from his post.
It was a move that angered the hardliners in Iran and was seen as a sign of a growing rift between Zarif and those like Amir-Abdollahian who had closer ties to the revolutionary guards and were sceptical of opening to the West.
When Ibrahim Raisi became president, Amir-Abdollahian triumphantly returned as the new foreign minister taking the reins from Zarif – the man who had fired him just a few years before.As foreign minister, Amir-Abdollahian’s attempts at reviving the nuclear deal with more favourable terms for the Islamic Republic, in indirect talks with the Biden administration, failed.
