TEHRAN, May 22.— The Iranian Mehr agency revealed more details of the accident of the helicopter in which President Raisi was traveling, according to an interview with state television by Gholamhossein Esmaili, Iran’s presidential chief of staff.
Esmaili, who was on one of three helicopters returning from the opening ceremony of a dam on Iran’s border with the Republic of Azerbaijan, said the weather conditions in the Iranian region of Varzaqan, where the president’s helicopter crashed Raisi, they were perfect at the beginning and during most of the flight that took place the day before.
He said the helicopters had taken off around 1pm on May 19, while weather conditions in the area were normal. After 45 minutes of flight, the pilot of President Raisi’s helicopter who was in charge of the convoy ordered the other helicopters to increase altitude to avoid a nearby cloud. However, the president’s helicopter, which was flying between the other two, suddenly disappeared.
“After 30 seconds of flying above the clouds, our pilot noticed that the helicopter in the middle had disappeared,” Esmaili said, adding that the pilot decided to circle around and return to look for the president’s helicopter. Easmaili said that after several attempts to contact the president’s helicopter through radio devices, and although he was unable to decrease altitude due to clouds, his helicopter continued its flight and landed at a nearby copper mine.
He said Foreign Minister Amirabdollahian and the head of the president’s protection unit did not respond to subsequent repeated calls; However, the pilots of the other two helicopters had contacted Captain Mostafavi, who was in charge of the president’s helicopter, but the one who answered the call was Tabriz’s Friday prayer leader, Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem. , whose situation was not good and said that the helicopter had crashed in a valley.
Esmaili himself made a second contact with Ale-Hashem and received the same answers about the situation. “When we found the crash site, the conditions of the bodies indicated that Ayatollah Raisi and other companions had died instantly but Ale-Hashem had been martyred after several hours,” he said.
