Death of Iranian Ebrahim Raisi: An incident full of cover-ups

Two months after the helicopter crash that killed late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the incident remains shrouded in mystery and there are many unanswered questions due to the lack of transparency in the government’s investigation.

The Tehran-based newspaper Ham-Mihan has published a report that highlights the ongoing ambiguities and the lack of a “final or publishable” conclusion.

“The reports are still not convincing and the ambiguities surrounding the president’s helicopter crash lead to unanswered questions from the public, which is likely to keep the case open,” lawyer and jurist Mohammad Saleh Noghrekar told the daily.

On May 19, a helicopter crashed In the northwest, all the passengers were killed instantly, including Raisi and his foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. The president had returned from inspecting a dam project and had the official delegation on board with three helicopters. The other two helicopters were making a normal flight.

Initial investigations revealed that only 69 seconds passed between the last contact with the helicopter pilots and the crash without the emergency status being declared – a detail that raises more questions than it answers. It remains unclear what happened in those 69 seconds that prevented the emergency status from being declared at all.

The second report of the High Commission investigating the extent and causes of the helicopter crash noted that the weather forecast of May 19 predicted favorable weather conditions for visual flights to the first and second destinations until 8:50 a.m. on the day of the incident. The newspaper report stressed that the weather on the return route requires further investigation based on the latest documents received and statements from the pilots and passengers of two other helicopters.

Intensifying the controversyHam-Mihan mentioned rumors, which it could neither independently confirm nor deny, that according to security protocols, one or two escort helicopters should have accompanied the president’s helicopter. However, the helicopter carrying Raisi and his companions had no escort. This security blunder is considered one of the biggest in recent Iranian history, the newspaper said.

To further complicate the story, the agency investigating the crash ruled out “an explosion caused by sabotage during the flight and shortly before the collision with the slopes” in a report published on May 29.

The General Staff of the Armed Forces later published a second report ruling out sabotage and confirming that no maintenance deficiencies or exceedances of capacity limits were found. The report did little to dispel public doubts.

Noghrekar also pointed to the obsolescence of the Bell 212 helicopter purchased from Canada in 1994, which had been in service for more than 30 years and lacked the necessary weather radar. This detail underscores the broader problem of Iran’s aging aircraft fleet, which is exacerbated by international sanctions that hamper the renewal of helicopters and aircraft and pose significant security risks.

“This issue also introduced numerous risks to the flight in terms of safety indicators, making the flight conditions highly risky,” he added.

Speculation and rumors have only increased as official reports continue to produce inconclusive results.

In a country already plagued by internal conflict, the ambiguity surrounding Raisi’s death is particularly worrying. The Solidarity of Iranian Republicans (SIR) echoed these views in a May 30 statement, stressing that if the crash was the result of an “internal conspiracy,” there could be “escalating mafia-like relations” within the government.