We Need To Discuss About Iran Helicopter Crash: The Follow-Up
Warning and Caution: This follow-up is a compilation of Western presstitutes’ reports on and reacts to the aftermath of the deaths of the Iranian President and some high ranking Iranian officials. Therefore, readers should treat this follow-up with a grain of salt! Except certain factual information from Iranian sources!
From Time Magazine
The Questions Lingering Around the Death of Iran’s President
May 28, 2024 3:13 PM EDT
Kay Armin Serjoie is an Iranian journalist who has reported from Tehran for TIME, AFP and the Washington Post. He is now based in Europe.
When the helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi went missing on May 19, initial reports said nine passengers were on board, including two bodyguards. But after the wreckage was finally found, the number of bodies was eight. Four days later, the mystery of the second bodyguard was revealed in social media posts: Javad Mehrabl is seen leaning disconsolately in the rear of the memorial service for Raisi.
Press accounts said that, at the last minute, his boss, Mehdi Mousavi, had directed him from the President’s helicopter to one of the two others moving in convoy that day.
After Mousavi died in the crash, his father told Iranian state television that he knew his son would not return from this trip. “The night before the trip he visited us,” the father says on camera. “He said goodbye and got into his car but returned and stayed 20 minutes. Then he left but after a short drive he returned again and spent 10 more minutes with us.” He grows choked up. “The third time when saying goodbye he kissed his mother, he kissed his mother’s feet, he kissed me, and then bent down and kissed my feet.
“It was then I knew he would go and never return, I knew we would never meet again.”
The bodyguards were members of a special unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military force created in 1979 to replace an Iranian army distrusted by the country’s new theocratic government. Their unit, Sepah Ansar al-Mahdi, is responsible for the personal security of the regime’s senior officials. To that end, its members carry phones specially equipped not only for secure communication, but also for location tracking. The device Mousavi carried on board presumably would have been useful in locating the helicopter, which went down in rugged terrain not far from Iran’s border with Azerbaijan. Yet it took 16 hours for rescuers to reach it.
The Sepah does not appear to be under suspicion, at least by Iran’s most senior official: In one photo from the funeral for Raisi and other victims, Sepah bodyguards account for a good two-thirds of the people arrayed behind Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. His throat is warmed, as usual, by the cross-hatched scarf of the IRGC that signals his closeness to the Guard.
More than a week after Raisi was killed, mysterious questions persist not only about the crash, but also about what will come next.
Some of the questions have explanations: The transponder on an aircraft carrying senior officials reportedly was switched off as a matter of routine, out of fear of tracking by hostile governments. When the helicopter went down, on a wooded hilltop in northwest Iran, one passenger survived long enough to retrieve the pilot’s ringing cell phone, tried to describe the area, and died awaiting rescue. Sparse cell coverage would have hampered efforts to locate it by triangulation.
Still other questions might be answered by forensic technical investigation. Raisi’s chief of staff, who was flying on another chopper, said that shortly before disappearing, the President’s pilot ordered the other helicopters to climb in altitude in order to rise above clouds clinging to the hills. The other aircraft did so, but the President’s helicopter was not heard from again.
And some information, while intriguing, is open to interpretation. Iranians might put the father’s story, for instance, to some premonition accessible to the devout.
But others will hear it as evidence of plot—something not unprecedented in a regime known both for its opacity and its brutality. Raisi’s elderly mother added to the speculation when she appeared in a video, visibly upset and calling for the death of “anyone who killed you other than God.”
Her son was widely assumed to be in the running to succeed Khamenei, who is 85 and frequently reported to be in failing health. Raisi was supported in that effort by the most extreme faction of regime stalwarts, the Paydari Front. As President, Raisi had imposed the crackdown on “modesty” that in 2022 ensnared Mahsa (Jina) Amini, who died in the custody of the so-called morality police for allegedly improper hijab. He was also the face of the regime’s brutal confrontation of the uprising her death inspired—and blamed for the brutal deaths of more than 500 Iranians in the spontaneous movement that took “Woman, Life, Freedom” as its slogan. That he died returning from the inauguration of a dam called Qiz-Qalasi, or Fort of Girls, struck some as poetic justice.
Human rights groups knew Raisi as a member of the so called “Death Committee” that in 1988 ordered the summary execution of thousands of dissidents, described by regime officials themselves as "the biggest atrocity of the Islamic Republic... for which we will be condemned by history.”
Relatively unknown to the general populace just 10 years ago, Raisi had been fast tracked to national prominence just as the issue of Khamenei’s succession was gaining urgency. Rumors persist that the Supreme Leader has plans for his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed him. When, in a speech just hours after Raisi’s helicopter had gone missing, Khamenei prayed for his safe return but stressed that “the people should be confident that there will be no disturbance in the affairs of state.” His calm manner did not go unnoticed.
This would not be the first time that someone who did not share Khamenei’s vision for Iran’s future leadership had met a suspicious end. In 2017, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani died in a swimming pool. A founder of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani had been instrumental in propelling Khamenei to the top job. But in the decades that followed, they fell out so thoroughly that, by the time of his death, Rafsanjani was known as the top opponent of the Supreme Leader within the regime. When Rafsanjani’s family reported that his body recorded radioactive readings many times higher than safe levels, they requested an autopsy. The request was denied and, shortly afterwards, the case was closed.
So it was that, in the first hours after the helicopter crash, a battle emerged to define its meaning. An analysis of social media showed that 22% of X accounts involved in the discussions of the crash were fake, “operating within a sophisticated disinformation campaign” with a “potential to reach 6 million views” in the first two days, according to the cyber-security company Cyabra.
Cyabra, which is based in Tel Aviv, says it documented a conspiracy theory circulating online that maintained a Mossad agent named “Eli Copter” had caused the crash. The name had been lifted from a joke posted on Hebrew social media, but Israel’s spy agency has killed several senior Iranian nuclear scientists and military figures in recent years. Though any role in Raisis’s death was denied by Israel officials and discounted by Israeli analysts, the thought occurs.
Only two months earlier, in retaliation for an Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate building in Syria that killed two senior generals, Tehran launched some 300 missiles and drones toward Israel—its first direct attack on Israeli territory. After Iraq launched Scud missiles into Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, Israel laid plans to assassinate Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, calling it off after a rehearsal ended in the accidental deaths of five Israeli commandos.
Another of the campaigns promoted by the fake accounts put forward the “narrative that portrays Raisi as a national hero,” using the same hashtags as his supporters did. Fake accounts were also involved in the narrative that criticized him, though the public outbursts celebrating his death were real enough. Clips that showed families of those killed by the regime shouting and dancing in joy became so bold that police began arresting anyone they deemed to have “insulted” Raisi online.
The authorities might have hoped that the death of a President while performing his duty would garner some sympathy for the Islamic Republic. But the divide between regime and society seems too deep to be bridged by Raisi’s death.
From VOA (View/Voice Of Asses)
Iran helicopter crash that killed president leaves mysteries unresolved 10 days later
May 30, 2024 2:13 AM
WASHINGTON —
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.
The following interview transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
VOA: Why do you think two of the helicopters in Raisi’s convoy succeeded in rising above the cloud cover while his aircraft did not?
Farzin Nadimi, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy: Of the three helicopters in the convoy, the one in the front was a (Canadian-built) Bell 212, and the middle one carrying the VIPs also was a Bell 212. The third helicopter in the rear was a (Russian-built) MIL Mi-171.
The lead helicopter was equipped with a weather radar. The middle one with the VIPs was not, but apparently its pilot was in command of the convoy. There is no evidence that the pilot of the radar-equipped lead helicopter, who usually has a pathfinding role in bad weather, was in contact with the other helicopters. We do not have access to any recording of the pilots' communications. But the lead pilot should have warned the rear helicopters that they were encountering some bad conditions and low cloud cover.
Why the middle helicopter could not manage to increase altitude in time to clear the mountainous terrain, we do not know. For some reason, that pilot was not able to increase altitude quickly enough. Some technical malfunction might have contributed to this failure, or he may have calculated the barometric pressure incorrectly and thought he was able to clear the terrain.
VOA: Another curious aspect of the crash is the apparent initial survival of the cleric, Ale-Hashem, and his reported phone calls with several officials in the first few hours after impact. How could that have been possible?
Nadimi: It is a strange turn of events. The pilot of Raisi’s helicopter seems to have made a “controlled flight into terrain” [an aviation term meaning the aircraft accidentally hit the ground while under the pilot’s control].
While other clues may be found later and point us in a different direction, for now we believe the pilot flew into the terrain due to a mistake or technical issue. The aircraft’s attitude [an aviation term meaning its orientation relative to Earth's horizon] at the point of impact suggests that it crashed with heavy force. Some of the crew members and passengers were badly burned. However, in the initial stages of the crash, the force of impact probably threw this individual out of the cabin. For some reason, he miraculously survived the fall, and despite being badly injured, he had access to the pilot’s mobile phone.
VOA: That seems odd, doesn’t it?
Nadimi: It does seem odd, given the fact that the pilot and copilot would have been sitting in the front of the helicopter and would have absorbed the main force of impact. Their bodies seemed to have burned beyond recognition, but somehow, the pilot’s phone survived this impact and ended up close enough to this individual for him to answer the phone calls. That might be what actually happened. But such circumstances would be very strange../.”
Of course, there have been quite a few Iranians inside and outside Iran, not just the remnant of Pahlavi regime, would jump for joy on the deaths of these high figures of the Islamic regime they hate, for the officials they resented. it was well expected! Just as the Vietnamese in Orange county CA, USA and even in the current South Vietnam would certainly jump for joy on any death of the rulers in current Vietnamese communist regime. I am sure 101% that WHEN the Jewish orange clown or Jewish Joe the cadaver die, millions of Americans will celebrate. I know I certainly will!
Well, here also is well expected from the leader of the “free world” with high morality of Christian values!
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