Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hussein Amirabdollahian did not return from their trip to Azerbaijan. Part of the country is in mourning. Images of a farewell.
Tens of thousands of people in Iran gathered in the center of the capital Tehran on Wednesday morning to attend the funeral ceremonies for President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash. The crowd gathered around the University of Tehran, where Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is expected to lead prayers for Raisi and his companions who also died.
Many people in the crowd held portraits of Raisi or waved Iranian flags. Wednesday was declared a day off for the funeral ceremonies. Tehran residents received messages on their cell phones calling on them to attend the funeral ceremonies of “martyr” Raisi.
Some countries, such as Russia, Turkey and Iraq, wanted to send representatives to the funeral ceremonies. The political head of the radical Islamic Palestinian organization Hamas, Ismail Haniya, and the number two of the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, Naim Kassem, are also expected to attend.
Five days of national mourning in Iran
Raisi crashed a helicopter over mountainous terrain in bad weather in northwestern Iran on his way to Tabriz on Sunday. Among the plane’s eight occupants were Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the head of Raisi’s security team and an imam. Her death was confirmed on Iranian state television on Monday after hours of searching and uncertainty.
The government declared five days of national mourning. Tens of thousands of mourners had already gathered in the capital Tehran on Monday. The official funeral ceremonies began on Tuesday in Tabriz. There, hundreds of thousands of people followed a truck on which the coffins of the crash victims were laid out.
After the funeral procession in Tabriz, Raisi’s body was flown on Tuesday to the Shiite pilgrimage site of Qom, where a funeral procession went to the shrine of Fatima Masuma. The president’s body is to be buried in his hometown of Mashchad in northeastern Iran on Thursday.
The ultra-conservative Raisi has been President of Iran since 2021. During his term in office, the country experienced mass protests triggered by the death of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022, an economic crisis exacerbated by US sanctions and a dangerous confrontation with declared arch-enemy Israel, in which Tehran used hundreds of drones and missiles for the first time in April fired on Israel from its territory.
Source: Stern
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