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A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raïssi is nowhere to be found after an emergency “hard landing” in a mountainous and rural area near the border between Iran and Azerbaijan on Sunday, May 19.
Emergency services have not yet been able to reach the location where the device is located, while the weather is very cloudy according to initial images of the operation broadcast by the Fars press agency.
Ebrahim Raïssi met his counterpart Ilham Aliev on Sunday morning on the occasion of the inauguration of a dam on the Araxe river, near the Iranian prefecture of Khoda Afarin, along the border with Azerbaijan.
During the return trip, while the convoy was heading towards the city of Tabriz, where the president was to visit an oil refinery, one of the planes made an emergency “hard landing”, according to several media outlets, including Tasnim News and Jam Jam Online.
The two other helicopters in the presidential convoy were able to continue their journey without incident. The Minister of the Interior, Ahmad Vahidi, confirmed these first elements on television.
On the Khabar channel, Mr. Vahidi said he was waiting for help to arrive in the landing zone, whose progress was hampered by very cloudy weather – which appears to be confirmed by the first images broadcast by the Fars agency.
In addition to Ebrahim Raïssi, the presence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hossein Amir Abdollahian and the governor of the East Azerbaijan region, Malik Rahmati, as well as several other people in the helicopter is mentioned by several Iranian media.
He also claimed that communication had been established with the device, before implying that exchanges were no longer possible due to the difficult weather conditions in the region.
According to the ISNA agency, the landing would have taken place in the vicinity of the Dizmar forest, a rural and mountainous area which borders the border between Iran and Azerbaijan.
The Fars news agency relayed, on Sunday afternoon, the first calls to prayer for the Iranian president in the city of Mashhad.