Ebrahim Raisi

Ebrahim Raisi was the eighth president of Iran, from 2021 until he died in a helicopter crash in May 2024. He was born in Mashhad to a clerical family and began religious study at fifteen, in the seminary at Qom. He rose through the judiciary rather than through elected politics, serving as prosecutor of Karaj and Hamadan while still in his twenties. In 1988 he sat on the Tehran panel of what became known as the death commission, which sent thousands of imprisoned members of the People's Mujahedin and left-wing groups to execution after brief hearings. Estimates of the dead run to five thousand. He never denied his role and defended the commission as a lawful application of religious judgement. He became head of the judiciary in 2019 and was sanctioned by the United States. He lost the presidential election of 2017 to Hassan Rouhani, then won in 2021 in a contest from which the Guardian Council had disqualified every serious rival, on the lowest turnout in the republic's history. His presidency saw the economy squeezed by sanctions, the nuclear negotiations stall, and the protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022 met with mass arrests and executions. He was widely regarded as a likely successor to Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. His helicopter came down in fog in the mountains of East Azerbaijan on 19 May 2024, killing him and the foreign minister. His death triggered a snap election won by the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, an outcome few had expected. The succession question he had been positioned to answer remains open, and his removal from it was entirely accidental.

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