Calls, Search Parties, Drones: 17 Hours to Find Iran’s President

NY Times-May 25th2024

As a frenzied quest began for the fallen helicopter of President Ebrahim Raisi, Iran moved to control possible threats from abroad and unrest at home.

Shortly before embarking on a fatal helicopter ride on Sunday, Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, and his delegation of senior officials held a communal prayer. Someone suggested having lunch, but the president demurred, saying he was in a hurry to reach his next destination.

Mr. Raisi boarded the aircraft and sat by a window. The foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, stopped for a picture with a crowd that was swarming the tarmac. He smiled and placed one hand over his chest while holding a brown briefcase in the other.

Around 1 p.m., a convoy of three helicopters took off from a helipad on Iran’s border with Azerbaijan, with the president’s craft in the middle. But about half an hour into the flight, the president’s helicopter vanished.

Calls to passengers on the president’s helicopter were met with silence until one answered. “I don’t know what happened,” Ayatollah Mohammad-Ali Al-Hashem said, sounding distraught. “I am not feeling well.” Two hours later, his phone, too, went silent.

As a frenzied 17-hour search unfolded, government officials began an aggressive effort to guard against possible threats from abroad and, especially, unrest at home, mindful of an uprising led by women and girls in 2022 that demanded the end of the Islamic Republic.

While Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was reassuring Iranians on national television that they need not fear any disruption to the country’s security, officials were scrambling. Iran placed its Armed Forces on high alert, worried that enemies like Israel or ISIS might carry out covert strikes. It directed media coverage of the crash, controlling the flow of information and banning any suggestions that the president was dead. The government deployed plainclothes security agents on the streets of Tehran and other big cities to prevent antigovernment protests or celebrations of Mr. Raisi’s death, and the cybersecurity units of the police and the Intelligence Ministry monitored posts by Iranians on social media.

This account of what happened in the hours after the crash was pieced together from the accounts of senior Iranian officials traveling with the president; reports and videos from state television; government statements; open-source reports and video footage; five Iranian officials, including two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; three Iranian diplomats; a former vice president; several Iranian journalists; and a photographer who was present at the crisis-management center near the crash and who participated in the search.