Iranian official media reported that a chopper carrying President Ebrahim Raisi vanished in a “accident” on Sunday, and search and rescue crews were combing through a foggy mountaintop.
Concerns about the 63-year-old ultraconservative increased when reports stated that the chopper carrying him and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian lost touch in the province of East Azerbaijan.
“An accident happened to the helicopter carrying the president” in the Jolfa region of the western province, state television said, while some officials described the incident as a “hard landing”.
“The harsh weather conditions and heavy fog have made it difficult for the rescue teams to reach the accident site,” said one state broadcaster.
According to the IRNA news agency, more than forty rescue teams equipped with drones and search dogs were dispatched to the scene.
Raisi was in the province when he and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan officially opened a dam project on their shared border.
Three helicopters were in Raisi’s convoy; the other two had “reached their destination safely,” the Tasnim news agency said.
At a time of high regional tensions over the Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, which began on October 7 and has attracted the attention of other armed groups in the Middle East, foreign nations were keenly monitoring the search operation.
A US State Department spokesman said: “We are closely following reports of a possible hard landing of a helicopter in Iran carrying the Iranian president and foreign minister.
“We have no further comment at this time.”
In other live footage, worshippers could be heard performing prayers in Raisi’s birthplace of Mashhad, while an Iranian Red Crescent crew was observed making their way up a slope through dense fog and light rain.
