Iranian regime president Ebrahim Raisi and his eight-member delegation, including Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, were killed in a helicopter crash.
The regime’s Tasnim and Mehr news agencies confirmed on the morning of Monday, May 20, 18 hours after the helicopter accident during its journey from the Iranian border with Azerbaijan, that the wreckage had been found, ending the search operation and confirming the deaths of the president and the foreign minister of Iran.
Ebrahim Raisi was appointed as a “prosecutor” in Karaj at the age of twenty in 1980.
Raisi was a member of the “Death Committee” in the case of the execution of thirty thousand prisoners in the summer of 1988, a committee of four members that issued execution orders for prisoners within minutes. Most of the executed prisoners in the summer of 1988 were members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, the largest opposition group to the Iranian regime.
Since then, thousands of survivors of the 1988 summer executions, which are considered the bloodiest political purges by the regime against its critics, have named Ebrahim Raisi as the perpetrator of the crime. However, in the judicial system of the Iran’s regime, such missions led to Raisi’s growth and promotion.
In the decades before his presidency, whether in intermediate roles like the prosecutor of Tehran or senior roles like the Attorney General of the country, the First Deputy Chief Justice, and also as the Chief Justice, he was considered one of the key figures in Iran’s judicial network.
Over these years, the Iranian opposition, due to his involvement in the 1988 summer executions, has referred to him as the “Ayatollah of Execution” or “Ayatollah of Massacre.”
During the nationwide uprising of 2022, Ebrahim Raisi was directly responsible for the suppression and killing of more than 750 people, the execution of dissidents, and the imprisonment of over 30,000 individuals.
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, described Raisi’s death as “an irreparable and strategic blow to Khamenei and the entire regime of executions and massacres with consequences and chain crises at the head of the religious tyranny that drives the rebels.”
“A man who launched the first direct attack on Israel in his country’s history and a hardliner on whose watch hundreds of Iranians have been killed in the brutal repression of recent women-led protests, Mr Raisi had a huge amount of blood on his hands.
His fearsome reputation went back to the 1980s – a period that earned him the dubious soubriquet the Butcher of Tehran.
He sat on the so-called Death Panel of four Islamic judges who sentenced thousands of Iranian prisoners of conscience to their deaths during the purge of 1988.
Mr Raisi was personally involved in two of the darkest periods of Iranian repression. And he was seen as one of the favourite contenders to replace the elderly and ailing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.”
