By JON GAMBRELL (Associated Press)
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a stubborn protégé of the country's supreme leader, helped oversee the mass executions of 1000’s in 1988 and later led the country in enriching uranium to close weapons-grade levels and launched a significant drone and missile attack on Israel died. He was 63.
Raisi's sudden death, together with Iran's foreign minister and other officials the helicopter crash Sunday in northwestern Iran got here as Iran grapples with internal disagreements and its relations with the remainder of the world. An original cleric, Raisi once kissed the Koran, Islam's holy book, before the United Nations and spoke more like a preacher than a statesman when addressing the world.
Raisi, who had already lost a presidential election in 2017 to the relatively moderate incumbent Hassan Rouhani, finally got here to power 4 years later in a vote rigorously controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to eliminate all key opposition candidates.
His arrival got here after Rouhani's signed nuclear take care of world powers lay in tatters after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the deal, setting off years of renewed tensions between Tehran and Washington.
But while Raisi's recent government said it desired to rejoin the deal, it as an alternative resisted international inspections, including over an ongoing alleged Israeli sabotage campaign against its nuclear program. Talks in Vienna about restoring the agreement remained stalled in the primary months of his administration.
“Sanctions are the United States’ new way of war with the nations of the world,” Raisi told the United Nations in September 2021.
He added: “The policy of 'maximum repression' is still underway. We want nothing more than what is rightfully ours.”
Mass protests swept the country in 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a lady arrested for allegedly not wearing a hijab or headscarf, in line with the authorities' policy. Months of security crackdowns following the demonstrations left greater than 500 people dead and greater than 22,000 others arrested.
In March, a United Nations investigative panel found that Iran was accountable for the “physical violence” that led to Amini's death.
Then got here the Israel-Hamas war in 2023, wherein Iran-backed militias targeted Israel. Tehran itself launched a rare attack on Israel in April, firing a whole bunch of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. Israel, the United States and their allies fired the projectiles, nevertheless it showed how much the years-long shadow war between Iran and Israel had boiled over.
Khamenei appointed Raisi, a former Iranian prosecutor general, in 2016 to move the Imam Reza charitable foundation, which manages a conglomerate of corporations and foundations in Iran. It is considered one of many bonyads, or charitable foundations, funded by donations or assets confiscated after Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These foundations don’t publicly account for his or her spending and report only to Iran's supreme leader. The Imam Reza charity, called “Astan-e Quds-e Razavi” in Farsi, is taken into account considered one of the most important. Analysts estimate its value at tens of billions of dollars as the corporate owns nearly half of the land in Mashhad, Iran's second-largest city.
In appointing Raisi to the muse, Khamenei called him a “trustworthy person with great experience.” That led to speculation by analysts that Khamenei is perhaps grooming Raisi as a possible candidate to turn out to be Iran's third-ever supreme leader, a Shiite cleric who has the ultimate say on all state affairs and serves because the country's commander-in-chief.
Although Raisi lost his election campaign in 2017, he still received almost 16 million votes. Khamenei appointed him head of Iran's internationally criticized judiciary, long known for its closed-door trials of human rights activists and folks with Western connections. The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Raisi in 2019 “for his administrative oversight of the executions of persons who were minors at the time of their offenses and the torture and other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners in Iran, including amputations.”
In 2021, Raisi became the dominant figure in elections after a panel under Khamenei disqualified candidates who posed the largest challenge to his protégé. In this vote, he received almost 62% of the 28.9 million votes, the bottom percentage turnout within the history of the Islamic Republic. Millions stayed home and others invalidated their ballots.
Raisi was defiant when asked at a news conference after his election in regards to the 1988 executions, which involved mock retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that later became often known as “death commissions.”
After Iran's then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a United Nations-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran has weakened its attack.
Around this time, the trials began, wherein the defendants were asked to discover themselves. Those who answered “mujahideen” were sent to their deaths, while others were questioned about their willingness to “clear minefields for the Islamic Republic's army,” based on a 1990 report by Amnesty International. International human rights groups estimate that as much as 5,000 people were executed. Raisi was a member of the commissions.
“I am proud to be a defender of human rights and the safety and well-being of people as a prosecutor wherever I have been,” Raisi said.
Raisi was born on December 14, 1960 in Mashhad and got here from a family whose lineage goes back to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, marked by the black turban he would later wear. His father died when he was five years old. He attended seminary within the Shiite holy city of Qom and later styled himself an Ayatollah, a senior Shiite cleric.
He leaves behind his wife and two daughters.
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