Tens of thousands of Iranians attended the Tehran funeral of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, whose death in a helicopter crash on a fog-shrouded mountain on Sunday has opened up a potentially volatile moment in Iranian politics.
He died with seven others, including the foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was hailed by Hamas on Wednesday as the minister for the resistance.
Amid chaotic crowd scenes, the coffins of those killed were shown to people gathered for the funeral as the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led prayers at the University of Tehran, where he embraced Raisi’s grandchildren and urged Iranians to remember a devoted servant. Many Iranians revile Raisi for his role in killing thousands of political prisoners during his political career.
Chants of ‘“death to Israel” were heard from the loyalist crowd as the coffins, draped in the Iranian flag, were taken through the capital as part of five days of national mourning.
Away from the religious ceremony, high politics continued with Khamenei meeting regional and Gulf leaders, as well as Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political office. Naim Qassem, the deputy chief of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, also attended the funeral.
Referring to pro-Palestine protests at American, European and Japanese universities, Khamenei told Haniyeh: “Who would have believed that one day in Japan there would be demonstrations in favour of Palestine, slogans in [the] Persian language ‘Death to Israel’.”
He said “God’s promise” to “wipe out” Israel would come true “just as God’s promise to the mother of Prophet Moses came true. By God’s grace, the day will come when Palestine will be formed from the river to the sea.”
Haniyeh relayed to Khamenei that he told Iran’s late foreign minister, Amir-Abdollahian, that he was regarded as the foreign minister for the resistance. Haniyeh also addressed the crowd.
He was speaking only two days after the International criminal court prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was seeking a warrant for Haniyeh’s arrest for war crimes against the Israeli people.
The supreme leader also promised that the acting president, Mohammad Mokhber, would continue with the same policies towards Israel.
Mokhber was one of a leading group of officials by the coffin who openly cried during the ceremony. Presidential elections have been set for 29 June.
Speculation about the cause of the helicopter crash continued. In a lengthy account, Gholam Hossein Esmaili, who travelled in one of the two other helicopters in Raisi’s entourage, told state TV that weather had been fine when the aircraft took off. But Raisi’s helicopter disappeared into heavy clouds and the others couldn’t reach the aircraft by radio, forcing them to land at a nearby copper mine.
Neither Amir-Abdollahian nor a bodyguard onboard responded to calls, but Tabriz cleric Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem answered two mobile phone calls, Esmaili said.
“When we found the location of the accident, the conditions of the bodies indicated that Raisi and other companions had died instantly but Ale-Hashem … [died] after several hours,” he said.
The other two helicopters had risen above the cloud relatively quickly. On realising that Raisi’s helicopter was not with them they turned back to search for him, but found nothing. It remains unclear if there was engine failure or pilot error in the murky conditions.
It was also revealed that the Turkish drones with night vision sent by Ankara at the request of Iran did not find the crash site. The discovery was made by an Iranian ground rescue crew.
In Tehran on Wednesday the acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, also attended a meetings with foreign dignitaries mainly from the region and the Gulf.
One of Bagheri’s first tasks will be to engage with Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear inspectorate, on allowing UN inspectors greater access to Iran’s nuclear sites. Grossi said talks about the future of inspections had been temporarily suspended owing to Raisi’s death.
The crowds in Tehran looked impressive, though diplomats said they were noticeably lower than the 2020 procession honouring the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad. Raisi, an ascetic rather than inspiring figure, was elected president in 2021 with the lowest turnout for a presidential election.
Photographs taken on Wednesday showed traffic jams on the way to the Caspian Sea, with some Tehran citizens seeking a holiday rather than attending the funeral.
Iranian politicians are holding back from discussing internal politics during the period of mourning, but Saeed Jalili is fast becoming the man to beat for the presidency.
