Pope Francis sent a telegram to Iran’s supreme leader on Monday, the day after the country’s president died in a helicopter crash. He offered “condolences upon the deaths of President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and all who perished”. The letter went to Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
“Entrusting the souls of the deceased to the mercy of the Almighty, and with prayers for those who mourn their loss, especially their families, I send the assurance of spiritual closeness to the nation at this difficult time,” the pope wrote.
Raisi was one of eight people killed on 19 May when an Iranian Air Force helicopter went down in East Azerbaijan province. State media reported that the bodies were found on Monday morning, after a long night of searching in dense fog and snow across rugged mountain terrain. The cause is still under investigation.
The president
Raisi was 63. For years he was seen as the likely successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A hardline religious conservative, he had close ties to the judiciary and the clerical elite, and he was made a prosecutor in several cities in his early 20s before taking a deputy prosecutor’s post in Tehran in 1989. He lost his first presidential bid in 2017 and won in 2021.
In 2016 he took over as chairman of Astan Quds Razavi, the biggest religious endowment in Mashhad. The trust holds billions of dollars in assets and looks after the shrine of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia imam.
His record drew criticism. In 1988 he sat on a committee overseeing executions of political prisoners, which made him unpopular with the Iranian opposition and led the US to sanction him. During the 2022 protests after Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police, he was president; the UN said Iran committed crimes against humanity in its crackdown. He also backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the war against the opposition there. After the US stance on the 2015 nuclear deal, he announced that Iran would expand its nuclear programme, while saying Tehran did not want a bomb.
The foreign minister and others
Amir-Abdollahian, 60, had worked in the Foreign Ministry since 1997, serving as ambassador to Bahrain and as deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs. Raisi named him foreign minister in 2021. He held a PhD in international relations from the University of Tehran. Under him Iran moved away from engaging the West and put more effort into ties with its neighbours, including the restoration of relations with Saudi Arabia under a Chinese-brokered agreement. He visited the kingdom in 2023. Since the Gaza war began, he had toured the region to coordinate with allies such as Hezbollah.
The dead also included East Azerbaijan governor Malek Rahmati, a recent cabinet appointee who had earlier headed Iran’s Privatization Organization and served as deputy director of Astan Quds Razavi. Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem, the supreme leader’s representative in the province and an imam in Tabriz, was killed as well. So were the head of Raisi’s guard team, Sardar Seyed Mehdi Mousavi, pilot Col Seyed Taher Mostafavi, co-pilot Col Mohsen Daryanush and flight technician Maj Behrouz Ghadimi.
Aviation analyst Kyle Bailey told Al Jazeera that the silence from the cockpit pointed to a “serious controllability issue”. A pilot facing a major technical fault must first “keep the plane flying, and then communications would be second”, he said.
Gaza and Rome
The crash came while Iran was locked in a standoff with Israel over the war in Gaza. Raisi had spoken with the pope the previous November, about a month after the Israel-Hamas war began, and reportedly asked him to use his influence to end Israel’s offensive. Amir-Abdollahian talked with Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher in October about the same war.
Mohammad Mokhber, who had been vice president, is serving as acting president.
Sources
- Who died alongside Iran’s President Raisi in the helicopter crash?
- Pope expresses ‘spiritual closeness’ to Iran after death of president in helicopter crash – EWTN Vatican
