Ten days after Iran’s president died in a helicopter crash in the country’s north, Iranian authorities have not explained why his was the only helicopter that crashed in dense cloud cover out of three that had been flying officials back to Iran from a visit to the Azerbaijani border.
Another unresolved question is how one of the passengers on the ill-fated helicopter apparently survived the May 19 crash in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province for several hours and answered several phone calls, according to Iranian state media, before rescuers reached the site and found him dead.
The passenger was identified as Iranian cleric Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem, the East Azerbaijan representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There were no survivors among the helicopter’s eight passengers and crew, including President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
The Iranian government’s latest assessment of the crash, shared in a TV report broadcast Sunday on state-run channel Network One, said the Armed Forces General Staff was “still investigating the cause of the accident.”
The report repeated an assessment shared by state TV several days earlier. It stated that the pilot of Raisi’s helicopter had instructed the other pilots to increase their altitude to emerge from the cloud cover. He apparently lost contact with the other helicopters 30 seconds later. The report said those aircraft made emergency landings at the Sungun copper mine 20 minutes after that, at 2 p.m. local time.
One significant new detail in the Network One TV report is that after the two helicopters landed, an official from one of those helicopters, Iranian Energy Minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian, spoke by phone to Ale-Hashem in the first few hours after the crash of Raisi’s aircraft. The report contained a brief clip of Mehrabian holding a phone and asking the cleric if he was OK.
Earlier, a second official who had been on one of the other helicopters, Raisi’s chief of staff Gholamhossein Esmaili, had told state TV on May 22 that after landing he also had spoken to Ale-Hashem by phone and heard that the cleric was hurt.
Farzin Nadimi, a Washington Institute for Near East Policy senior fellow specializing in Iranian security affairs, shared his assessment of some of the main unresolved questions from the Raisi helicopter crash in Wednesday’s edition of VOA’s Flashpoint Global Crises program.
