A helicopter carrying Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, was involved in a “hard landing” on Sunday, Iranian state media reported.
Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. State TV said the incident happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with the nation of Azerbaijan, about 375 miles (600km) north-west of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Traveling with Raisi were Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the governor of East Azerbaijan and other officials, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. A local government official used the word “crash” to describe the incident, but he acknowledged to an Iranian newspaper that he had yet to reach the site.
Neither IRNA nor state TV offered any information on Raisi’s condition.
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Rescuers were attempting to reach the site, state TV said, but had been hampered by poor weather. There had been heavy rain and fog reported with some wind. IRNA called the area a “forest”.
Raisi had been in Azerbaijan early on Sunday to inaugurate a dam with country’s 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 a gun attack on Azerbaijan’s embassy in Tehran in 2023, and Azerbaijan’s diplomatic relations with Israel, which Iran’s Shia theocracy views as its main enemy in the region.
Iran owns a variety of helicopters, 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 formerly led the country’s judiciary. He is viewed as a protege 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 from the role.
He won Iran’s 2021 presidential election, a vote that saw the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history. Raisi is under sanctions by the US in part over his involvement in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988 at the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Under Raisi, Iran now enriches uranium at nearly weapons-grade levels and hampers international inspections. Iran has armed Russia in its war on Ukraine, as well as having launched a substantial drone-and-missile attack on Israel amid its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It has continues to arm proxy groups in the Middle East, such as Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
