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伊朗總統座機墜毀-A. Sewell
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What do we know so far about the mysterious crash of the helicopter carrying Iran's president?
ABBY SEWELL, 05/20/24
BEIRUT (AP) — The apparent crash of a helicopter carrying Iran's president and foreign minister on Sunday sent shock waves around the region.
Details remained scant in the hours after the incident, and it was unclear if Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and the other officials had survived.
Here's what we know so far.
WHO WAS ON BOARD THE HELICOPTER AND WHERE WERE THEY GOING?
The helicopter was carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. Raisi was returning from a trip to Iran’s border with Azerbaijan earlier Sunday to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, the news agency said.
WHERE AND HOW DID THE HELICOPTER GO DOWN?
The helicopter apparently crashed or made an emergency landing in the Dizmar forest between the cities of Varzaqan and Jolfa in Iran's East Azerbaijan province, near its border with Azerbaijan, under circumstances that remain unclear. Initially, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said the helicopter “was forced to make a hard landing due to the bad weather and fog.”
WHAT IS THE STATUS OF THE SEARCH OPERATIONS?
Iranian officials have said the mountainous, forested terrain and heavy fog impeded search-and-rescue operations. The president of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir-Hossein Koulivand, said 40 search teams were on the ground in the area despite “challenging weather conditions.” The search is being done by teams on the ground, as “the weather conditions have made it impossible to conduct aerial searches” via drones, Koulivand said, according to IRNA.
IF RAISI DIED IN THE CRASH, HOW MIGHT THIS IMPACT IRAN?
Raisi is seen as a protégé to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a potential successor for his position within the country’s Shiite theocracy. Under the Iranian constitution, if he died, the country’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, would become president. Khamenei has publicly assured Iranians that there would be “no disruption to the operations of the country” as a result of the crash.
WHAT HAS THE INTERNATIONAL REACTION BEEN?
Countries including Russia, Iraq and Qatar have made formal statements of concern about Raisi’s fate and offered to assist in the search operations.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev said he was “deeply concerned” to hear of the incident, and affirmed that Azerbaijan was ready to provide any support necessary. Relations between the two countries have been chilly due to Azerbaijan’s diplomatic relations with Israel, Iran's regional arch-enemy.
Saudi Arabia, which is traditionally a rival of Iran although the two countries have recently made a rapprochement, also expressed concern in a statement and said it “stands by Iran in these difficult circumstances.”
There was no immediate official reaction from Israel. Last month, following an Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus that killed two Iranian generals, Tehran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel. They were mostly shot down and tensions have apparently since subsided.
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萊希總統的劣跡和西方社會的偽善 -- Madeline Grant
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The death of Iran’s president Raisi has exposed the sickness at the heart of the West
Madeline Grant, 05/22/24
The women of Iran are dancing. Women blinded, with one eye, or one arm, are dancing. Iranian Kurds are dancing. Across Europe, Iranian dissidents are dancing. Iranians – often, relatives of the regime’s victims – are drinking to show their joy. The daughters of Minoo Majidi, a mother shot dead by security services during the 2022 protests, shared a video of them raising a glass to President Raisi’s death.
Dark humour – the jokes of an oppressed people – are circulating. “Mr Raisi, you surprised us. We have no tapas for our drinks,” chuckles one Iranian in a celebratory video on social media. There was the gag about how a Mossad agent called “Eli Copter” had caused the crash. People have handed out cakes and sweets in public squares – an act of symbolic importance in Persian culture, often associated with joyous events. Celebratory fireworks filled the skies in Iranian cities.
Such courage is all the more impressive given how little Raisi’s death is likely to change anything in this closed prison of a society. It may somewhat alter the succession, since he had been one of the men tipped to succeed Khamenei, but the Ayatollahs retain their stranglehold. The bravery of anyone involved in any celebration or act of civil disobedience such as removing a headscarf, is astounding. Those letting off fireworks or handing out sweets are risking their lives.
History will remember Raisi as a squalid tyrant who took a twisted pride in human suffering. He was involved in the torture and extrajudicial murder of thousands of political prisoners held in Iranian jails and the mass killings of opponents in 1988, when as many as 30,000 are believed to have lost their lives. As Mariam Memarsadeghi wrote in a chilling article for Tablet magazine, “virgins were systematically raped before their execution, to circumvent the Islamic prohibition on killing virgins and to prevent women and girls from reaching heaven”.
And yet, the BBC posted about “President Ebrahim Raisi’s mixed legacy in Iran”. You can imagine the 1945 headlines about the mixed legacy of “motorway-builder, vegetarian rights enthusiast and dog-lover” Adolf Hitler, or that of “inspirational plus-size influencer” Hermann Goering. Reuters described how Raisi “rose through Iran’s theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president, as he burnished his credentials to position himself to become the next supreme leader”.
Reading such things you would think Raisi was, at worst, a slight renegade. A cheeky chappie in a kaftan whose loss will be felt by light entertainment for generations. They tweeted like he was Rod Hull – rather than, you know, someone nicknamed “the Butcher of Tehran”. But in the real world, faced with the real consequences of the regime he ran, people are dancing.
It wasn’t just the BBC in its classic “tightrope walk” mode, either. Things were getting a bit Candle in the Wind at the UN, as the entire Security Council (including both the UK and US representatives) stood to observe a minute of silence for President Raisi. Goodbye Tehran’s rose.
European Council president Charles Michel tweeted out his sincere condolences, while the “European Commissioner for Crisis Management” committed the EU’s Copernicus satellite system to help locate Raisi’s helicopter, in the name of “#EUSolidarity”.
Lest we forget, Johan Floderus, a young EU official from Sweden, has been incarcerated at Iran’s notorious Evin prison for more than two years. We don’t see much “#EUSolidarity” coming from the other direction. Not to be undone, President Higgins of Ireland channelled the spirit of Eamon de Valera c.1945, by offering his “deepest sympathies” upon the death of a tyrant.
Such statements go well beyond basic diplomacy. Nobody asked anyone to gush; they chose to. The message it sends is a slap in the face to those bravely putting their lives on the line for freedom. But it’s par for the course in what is (sometimes optimistically) termed the “international community”.
Speaking of which, on Monday, the International Criminal Court put out joint bids for arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and the prime minister and defence minister of Israel. Given that the ICC has no jurisdiction, nor power of its own to arrest anyone, there was something bleakly comic about the manner of the announcement. Chief prosecutor Karim Khan delivered his statement flanked by a couple of glaring bureaucrats. The ICC appeared to be putting on its best “don’t mess with us” face. It looked like a geriatric version of Bugsy Malone.
The ICC application refers, pointedly, to the “territory of Israel” and the “state of Palestine”, which makes it clear which side its bread is buttered. It notably ignores Hamas’s use of human shields, surely a factor when assessing the civilian death toll. It even holds Israel entirely responsible for “closing the three border crossing points” after October 7.
Yet Hamas destroyed the Erez crossing, murdering its operators and blowing up the barriers separating it from the Gaza strip. Small wonder border checkpoints weren’t up and running immediately. Condemning Israel for this is grotesque; gaslighting on an international scale.
The timing is also telling. We have known about the crimes of October 7 from day one, thanks to the body-cams Hamas terrorists so proudly wore to document their butchery. Yet the ICC waited until May 2024 to condemn both Israel and Hamas on the same day. The effect is to suggest a moral equivalence between a democratic state and a genocidal terrorist group that says it wants to repeat the atrocities of October 7 indefinitely. You don’t have to believe Israel is above criticism – and nor should we – to recognise this.
Multinational organisations like the ICC are often held up as moral arbiters in themselves, when they will only be as virtuous or corrupt as their component member states, and reflecting the same biases. The World Health Organisation has long excluded Taiwan from its membership due to Chinese pressure. A ruinous decision, when Taiwan’s early warnings about the risks of human-to-human transmission of Covid in late 2019 were ignored. Something is rotten in the state of many international bodies and moral courage is in short supply.
Given such a clear-cut case of evil as Raisi, the mealy-mouthed global response does not bode well. For genuine bravery, we can look to the people at the sharp end of such regimes. Because still, in the midst of it all, the women of Iran dance.
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伊朗總統罹難 -- 丘力龍
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伊朗總統、外長確認罹難
丘力龍，TVBS，2024/05/20
伊朗總統萊希（Ebrahim Raisi）與外長阿卜杜拉希安（Amir Abdollahian）乘坐的直升機，19日在該國東亞塞拜然省（East Azerbaijan Province）硬著陸，直升機完全燒毀，伊朗半官方媒體宣布，萊希、阿卜杜拉希安確認罹難，伊朗副總統穆赫森（Mohsen Mansouri）也在社群媒體證實消息。
《CNN》、《半島電視台》報導，伊朗媒體引述紅新月會（Red Crescent）消息稱，救援隊稍早已找到直升機殘骸，距離硬著陸地點約只有2公里。根據伊朗《塔斯尼姆通訊社》公布事故現場空拍畫面，直升機螺旋槳及駕駛艙被燒毀，且熱像儀未探測到溫度。
伊朗《邁赫爾通訊社》（Mehr News Agency）報導，萊希、阿卜杜拉希安和直升機上的其他人員，包括東亞塞拜然省省長馬利克（Malek Rahmati），已「殉難」（martyred）。伊朗負責行政事務的副總統穆赫森（Mohsen Mansouri）也在社交媒體X證實，萊希死於空難。
萊希是伊朗第8任總統，如果得到伊朗最高領袖哈梅內伊（Ayatollah Ali Khamenei）批准，下一任總統將是第一副總統莫赫貝爾（Mohammad Mokhber）。
萊希和外長阿卜杜拉希安與另外7人，19日乘坐3架直升機前往東阿塞拜疆省（East Azerbaijan）出席水壩落成儀式，回程途中，萊希和阿卜杜拉希安乘坐的1架直升機硬著陸，另外2架則安全抵達目的地。
失事的直升機是美國飛行器生產商Bell Helicopter Textron旗下的Bell-212型直升機，有15個座位，可載1名機師、14名乘客，廣泛用於民航、商用、軍事用途。
伊朗官方媒體稱，惡劣天氣使救援工作變得更加複雜。早些時候，伊朗國家廣播公司停止所有節目，播放全國各地為萊希舉行的祈禱活動。今（20）日凌晨，畫面顯示一支救援隊穿著鮮豔的夾克，戴著手電筒，在暴風雪中徒步搜索漆黑的山坡。
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