Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline protege of the country's supreme leader who helped oversee mass executions in 1988 and later led the country as it enriched uranium closer to weapons-grade levels and launched a major drone-and-missile attack on Israel, has died at age 63.
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Raisi's sudden death, along with Iran's foreign minister and other officials in the helicopter crash on Sunday in northwestern Iran, came as Iran struggles with internal dissent and its relations with the wider world.
A cleric first, Raisi once kissed the Quran before the United Nations and spoke more like a preacher than a statesman when addressing the world.
Raisi, who lost a presidential election to the relatively moderate incumbent Hassan Rouhani in 2017, ended up coming to power four years later in a vote carefully managed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to clear any major opposition candidate.
His arrival came after Rouhani's signature nuclear deal with world powers remained in tatters after then-president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the accord, setting in motion years of renewed tensions between Tehran and Washington.
But while saying he wanted to rejoin the deal, Raisi's administration instead pushed back against international inspections, in part over an ongoing suspected sabotage campaign carried out by Israel targeting its nuclear program.
Talks in Vienna at restoring the accord remained stalled in his government's first months.
"Sanctions are the US's new way of war with the nations of the world," Raisi told the United Nations in 2021. "The policy of 'maximum oppression' is still on. We want nothing more than what is rightfully ours."
Mass protests swept the country in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman who had been detained over allegedly not wearing a hijab, or headscarf, to the liking of authorities. The months-long crackdown that followed the demonstrations killed more than 500 people, while more than 22,000 others were detained.
Then came the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, in which Iranian-backed militias targeted Israel.
When a missile attack killed senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers in Iran's embassy in Damascus in April, Tehran launched an extraordinary attack on Israel, in which hundreds of drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles were fired.
Israel, the US and its allies shot down the projectiles, but it showed just how much the years-long shadow war between Iran and Israel had boiled.
Khamenei appointed Raisi, a former Iranian attorney-general, in 2016 to run the Imam Reza charity foundation, which manages a shadowy multibillion-dollar conglomerate of businesses and endowments in Iran.
Raisi's appointment to the foundation led to analyst speculation that Khamenei could be grooming Raisi as a candidate to be Iran's third supreme leader, a Muslim Shi'ite cleric who has final say on all state matters.
Though Raisi lost his 2017 campaign, he still garnered nearly 16 million votes. Khamenei installed him as the head of Iran's internationally criticised judiciary, long known for its closed-door trials of human rights activists and those with Western ties.
The US Treasury in 2019 sanctioned Raisi "for his administrative oversight over the executions of individuals who were juveniles at the time of their crime and the torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of prisoners in Iran, including amputations".
By 2021, Raisi became the dominant figure in the election after a panel under Khamenei disqualified candidates who posed the greatest challenge to his protege.
He swept 62 per cent of the 28.9 million votes in that poll, the lowest turnout by percentage in the Islamic Republic's history as millions stayed home and others voided ballots.
Raisi was defiant when asked after his election about the 1988 executions, which saw sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as "death commissions".
After Iran's then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire with Iraq follow an eight-year war, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border in a surprise attack. Iran blunted their assault.
The trials began about that time, with defendants asked to identify themselves.
Those who responded "mujahedeen" were sent to their deaths, while others were questioned about their willingness to "clear minefields for the army of the Islamic Republic", according to a 1990 Amnesty International report.
Rights groups estimate that as many as 5000 people were executed. Raisi served on the commissions.
"I am proud of being a defender of human rights and of people's security and comfort as a prosecutor wherever I was," Raisi said.
Raisi was born in 1960 to a religious family in Iran's holy Shi'ite city of Mashhad. At age five, he lost his father. Still, he followed in his footsteps to become a cleric.
As a young student at a seminary in the holy city of Qom, Raisi took part in protests against the Western-backed Shah in the 1979 revolution. Later, his contacts with religious leaders in Qom made him a trusted figure in the judiciary.
He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
AP with Reuters
Australian Associated Press
