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 in the Iranian province of East Azerbaijan. State television said the incident happened near Jolfa, a border town with the nation of 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 site himself.
Neither IRNA nor state television offered any information on Raisi's condition.
Rescuers were trying to reach the site, state television said, but had been hampered by poor weather conditions. There had been heavy rain and fog with some wind. IRNA called the area “forest”.
Office of the Iranian Presidency via AP
Raisi had been in Azerbaijan early Sunday 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 came despite chilly relations between the two nations, including over an armed attack on the Azerbaijani embassy in Tehran in 2023, and Azerbaijan's diplomatic relations with Israel, which Iran's Shiite theocracy considers its main enemy in the region.
Iran flies several helicopters domestically, 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 once headed the country's judiciary. He is considered a protégé of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some analysts have suggested he could replace the 85-year-old leader after his death or resignation.
Raisi won Iran's 2021 presidential election, a vote that recorded the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic's history. Raisi is sanctioned by the US in part for 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, which were put into effect by former President Donald Trump and maintained by President Biden, are 'tyrannical.'
“The new US administration, they claim they are different from the Trump administration,” Raisi told Lesley Stahl. “They have said so in their messages, but we have not witnessed any change in reality.”
Under Raisi, Iran is now enriching uranium to near-weapons levels and making international inspections more difficult. Iran has armed Russia in its war against Ukraine, as well as launched a massive drone and missile attack on Israel amid its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It has also continued to arm proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen's Houthi rebels and Lebanon's Hezbollah.
