17 hours to find the scene of the accident that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi

Just before setting off on a deadly helicopter flight on Sunday, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his delegation of senior politicians held a joint prayer. Someone suggested they have lunch, but the president declined, saying he was in a hurry to reach his next destination.

Mr Raisi boarded the plane and sat by the window. Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian stopped to have his picture taken with the crowd thronging the tarmac. He smiled and placed one hand on his chest, holding a brown briefcase in the other.

At around 1 p.m., a convoy of three helicopters took off from a landing pad on the Iranian border with Azerbaijan. The president’s plane was in the middle. But after about half an hour, the presidential helicopter disappeared.

Calls to passengers on the presidential helicopter were met with silence until one answered. “I don’t know what happened,” Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Al-Hashem said desperately. “I’m not feeling well.” Two hours later, his phone was also silent.

As the 17-hour, frantic search was underway, government officials began aggressive measures to protect themselves from potential foreign threats and, more importantly, from domestic unrest, conscious of an uprising by women and girls in 2022 demanding the end of the Islamic Republic.

While Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, assured Iranians on national television that they need not fear any compromise to the country’s security, authorities were in turmoil. Iran put its armed forces on high alert, fearing that enemies such as Israel or ISIS could carry out covert attacks. It directed media coverage of the crash, controlled the flow of information and banned any suggestions that the president was dead. The government deployed plainclothes security officers on the streets of Tehran and other major cities to prevent anti-government protests or celebrations of Raisi’s death, and cybersecurity units of the police and intelligence ministry monitored Iranians’ social media posts.

This account of events in the hours after the crash was compiled from the testimony of senior Iranian officials who were with the president; from state television reports and videos; from government statements; from open source reports and video footage; from the perspective of five Iranian officials, including two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; from three Iranian diplomats; from a former vice president; from several Iranian journalists; and from a photographer who was at the crisis management center near the crash site and participated in the search.

The president and a delegation of high-ranking politicians traveled to the border between Iran and Azerbaijan on Sunday morning to inaugurate a joint dam project. When the three helicopters took off with them, there was a thick cloud cover, as videos published in state media show.

Also on board the helicopter carrying Raisi and Foreign Minister Amir Abdollahian were Al-Hashem, the Friday prayer imam for the northern city of Tabriz, Malek Rahmati, the governor of East Azerbaijan province, and General Seyed Mehdi Mousavi of the Ansar unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s equivalent of the secret service, the head of presidential security. The helicopters followed the planned flight path but shortly after takeoff they encountered thick fog in a valley with rolling green mountains.

Mehrdad Bazrpash, Minister of Transport, and Gholam-Hossein Esmaili, the President’s Chief of Staff, were in the lead helicopter, which had just emerged from the fog when they noticed a commotion in the cockpit.

Mr. Bazrpash asked the pilot what was going on, he told state television in a recollection of those first hours. They had lost sight of the presidential helicopter and it had not responded to radio calls, the pilot told him, suggesting it might have made an emergency landing. The pilot turned around, Mr. Bazrpash said, and circled the area several times, but fog blocked visibility and descending into the valley was too risky.

The two helicopters eventually landed at a copper mine in the mountains of northwestern Iran, 74 kilometers (46 miles) from the nearest town. Within hours, a modest office building there was transformed into a crisis management center, with hundreds of officials, military commanders and even hikers and off-road motorcyclists, Azin Haghighi, a Tabriz-based photographer who was at the center, said in a telephone interview.

Esmaili said on state television that he had called the cellphones of Raisi, Amir Abdollahian, Al-Hashem and another official. No one answered.

He dialed the pilot’s number, but finally Mr. Al-Hashem answered.

“Where are you?” asked Mr. Esmaili, describing the conversation. “What happened? Can you give us a sign so we can find your location? Can you see the others? Are they OK?”

“I’m in the middle of the trees,” he said. “I’m alone. I can’t see anyone.”

When Mr Esmaili asked for more details, the priest described being in a forest with burnt trees. In subsequent calls, his voice became weaker and he sounded increasingly confused. After about two hours, he stopped answering.

Mr Bazrpash called the National Aerospace Control Center to find out the helicopter’s coordinates, but technicians there could only give an estimate of the crash area and, because of the remoteness of the site, were unable to track phone signals.

The exact location remained unclear. There was no signal from the helicopter. Panic broke out as officials in the other helicopters realized that the president’s plane had crashed violently and that Raisi, widely seen as the supreme leader’s likely successor, and others on board were either seriously injured or dead.

Authorities notified Tehran and requested emergency search and rescue teams, but it took hours for them to arrive. Dangerous weather and narrow roads winding around the mountains made the journey difficult, Bazrpash said in an interview with state television.

Mr Bazrpash said the presidential party officials did not wait for rescue teams but set out themselves in cars carrying people from the copper mine. But in fog, wind and rain, he said, they were forced to abandon the cars and walk to nearby villages in the hope that locals could help them find the crash site. The efforts proved futile, he said, and they returned to the mine.

In Tehran, Mohammad Mokhber, the first vice president and now acting president, chaired a scheduled cabinet meeting. Although he knew about the crash and the possibility that Raisi had died, he continued to handle his day-to-day government business and waited until the end of the meeting to tell the rest of the cabinet the news, according to government spokesman Ali Bahadori Jahromi.

Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, was informed of the accident immediately after officials confirmed the presidential helicopter’s disappearance. He called an emergency meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council at his home and urged members to maintain order and show strength, according to a Guards Corps member and a government official who were briefed on the meeting but were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has called media organizations and issued guidelines for reporting, including a news blackout on any suggestions that the president and other officials might be dead, said four Iranian journalists who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

The first reports that the presidential helicopter had made a “hard landing” appeared on state television in the early afternoon. For hours, false information circulated on official and semi-official news channels. For example, it was said that Raisi was on his way back to Tabriz, or was safe and sound, or that the helicopter’s passengers had all survived.

An Iranian businessman and a media analyst, both of whom have large social media followers, said in interviews that the Intelligence Ministry contacted them at around 6 p.m. on Sunday and asked them to delete social media posts about the crash. The Guards Corps Intelligence Service arrested a person who allegedly posted false information about the presidential helicopter, Fars News reported on Thursday.

However, around 11 p.m. on Sunday, the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance asked state media to call for prayer and told them to prepare for an official announcement the next morning.

Back at the mine, General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of the Guard, had taken command of the operation and sat down in a conference room where a 3D map of the crash site was projected onto a large screen.

“It was chaos, everyone was nervous,” said photographer Haghighi. “Search teams went out in groups and came back saying it was impossible to see anything. In the control center, people were screaming, running from room to room, desperately waiting for news.”

Iran needed its state-of-the-art drones to locate the crash site, but they were already deployed in the Red Sea, so the country had to turn to Turkey and ask for a drone, the Iranian armed forces said in a statement. However, a state-of-the-art Iranian drone eventually returned from the Red Sea and found the crash site, the statement said.

At first light on Monday, rescue teams set out on foot. Mr Haghighi, who accompanied one of the rescuers, said it took them an hour and a half to hike up a steep mountain and then down through a muddy forest.

The first to reach the site, however, were the volunteer motorcyclists. One video shows one of them running through the trees, shouting “Haj Agha, Haj Agha,” while calling out to Mr Raisi by pet names. When he sees the helicopter’s broken tail, the charred wreckage and the luggage scattered on the ground, he wailes “Allah o Akbar, ya Hussein,” invoking God and a Shiite imam.

The helicopter exploded in a ball of fire on impact, the armed forces said in a statement. It later added that a preliminary investigation found no signs of foul play or firearms on the helicopter. However, many officials questioned whether safety protocols were followed and why the president travelled by plane despite stormy weather conditions.

The bodies of Raisi and Amir Abdollahian were discovered near the rubble. Both were burned beyond recognition, according to three officials in Tehran, two members of the Guard and Mr Haghighi, who saw the bodies.

Mr Raisi was identified by his ring and Mr Amir Abdollahian by his watch.