Iran: who was Ebrahim Raisi, the ultraconservative Iranian president who died in a helicopter crash

  • Creator, Editorial
  • Scroll, BBC Information World
  • 20 mayo 2024

The president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, died this Sunday after the helicopter by which he was touring suffered an accident when he was heading in direction of town of Tabriz, within the northwest of the nation, in keeping with native media.

The president was getting back from the border with Azerbaijan, the place he inaugurated the Qiz Qalasi and Khodaafarin dams.

Raisi, a 63-year-old cleric, was thought-about a hardliner with ultra-conservative political opinions, very near Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In 2021, he assumed the presidency of Iran in a disputed election, and at a time when the nation confronted a number of challenges, together with severe financial issues, rising regional tensions and stalled talks on reviving a nuclear take care of world powers.

Nonetheless, his tenure was dominated by anti-government protests that unfold throughout Iran in 2022, in addition to the continued warfare in Gaza between Israel and the Iranian-backed Palestinian group Hamas, throughout which warfare within the Gaza Strip re-emerged. shadow between Iran and Israel

Raisi was underneath US sanctions and had been linked to executions of political prisoners previously.

He was the second highest-ranking official within the nation, after Khamenei.

From inspector to president

Ebrahim Raisi was born in 1960 in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest metropolis and residential to the nation’s holiest Shiite Muslim shrine. His father, who was a priest, died when he was 5 years outdated.

Raisi continued in his father’s footsteps and commenced attending a seminary within the holy metropolis of Qom on the age of 15.

Throughout his pupil days he participated in protests in opposition to the Western-backed Shah, who was overthrown in 1979 in an Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

After the revolution, he joined the judiciary and served as a prosecutor in a number of cities whereas receiving coaching from Ayatollah Khamenei, who turned president of Iran in 1981.

At simply 25 years outdated he turned the deputy prosecutor of Tehran.

He later served as prosecutor of Tehran, head of the State Inspection Group and first deputy head of the judiciary, earlier than being appointed lawyer common of Iran in 2014.

In 2017 he shocked observers by operating for president of Iran. He misplaced decisively to Hassan Rouhani.

In 2019, Ayatollah Khamenei appointed him to the highly effective place of head of the judiciary, a place he held till, in his second presidential try, he received the elections in June 2021.

Caption, Raisi in one of many final pictures earlier than the helicopter accident.

Raisi all the time used to put on a black turban that recognized him, within the Shiite custom, as a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. Shiites are the bulk department of Islam in Iran.

He was thought-about a really loyal agent to the group of clerics that governs Iran and, in reality, was seen as a potential successor to Khamenei.

Accusations of mass executions

In the course of the 2021 marketing campaign, he offered himself as one of the best candidate to combat corruption and resolve Iran’s financial issues suffered underneath the mandate of outgoing president Hassan Rouhani.

Nonetheless, many Iranians and human rights activists expressed concern about his function within the mass executions of political prisoners within the Nineteen Eighties.

Raisi is recognized as a member of the so-called “Dying Committee”, a gaggle of 4 judges who in 1988 secretly issued demise sentences in opposition to some 5,000 imprisoned prisoners, in keeping with Amnesty Worldwide.

These courts “retried” 1000’s of prisoners who had been already serving jail sentences for his or her political actions. Most had been members of the leftist opposition group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), also referred to as the Folks’s Mujahedin Group of Iran (PMOI).

The precise variety of these sentenced to demise by the courts is unknown, however human rights teams have said that some 5,000 women and men had been executed and buried in unmarked mass graves, in what worldwide organizations thought-about against the law in opposition to humanity.

Iran has by no means acknowledged mass executions.

Raisi by no means addressed the allegations about his function in them. He even repeatedly denied his involvement within the demise sentences. However he additionally went as far as to say that they had been justified by a fatwa, or spiritual ruling, from the previous supreme chief, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Little or no is thought about Raisi’s personal life, besides that his spouse, Jamileh, taught at Shahid Beheshti College in Tehran and that that they had two grownup daughters. His father-in-law was Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda, the hardline chief of Friday prayers in Mashhad, northeastern Iran.

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