Ebrahim Raisi

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Ebrahim Raisolsadati, better known as Ebrahim Raisi, (14 December 1960 - 19 May 2024) was an Iranian jurist and the eighth President of Iran, serving from 2021 until his death in 2024 and succeeding Hassan Rouhani. He had previously run against Rouhani in 2017 but lost the election. He ran again in the 2021 election after Rouhani stepped down and won, in an election commonly perceived to have been rigged in his favour due to his being a hardline ally of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Biography

Raisi was born in Mashhad in 1960. In 1981 he became a prosecutor, and entered the inner circle of Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988, receiving special powers to deal with legal issues in several provinces.

Raisi was named by Iranian dissident Hussein-Ali Montazeri as one of the four judges who oversaw the mass execution without trial of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. Raisi and the then-prosecutor of Tehran were named in Khomeini's order to kill the prisoners, most of whom were members of the People's Mujahedin of Iran and other leftist factions. Raisi and his fellow judges enforced the disappearances of dissidents in detention centres all across Iran, many of whom were subjected to torture or other inhumane treatment. Once they had been "disappeared", the prisoners were hanged from cranes in groups of six at half-hour intervals. Estimates of how many were killed range from 2,800 - 30,000.

After Ali Khamenei succeeded Khomeini in 1989, Raisi became a vocal supporter of him. He was rewarded in 1994 with promotion to head of the General Inspection Office. He held this position until 2004, when he was promoted to Vice Chief Justice of Iran. Since then, he has been promoted to Chief Justice, a position he eventually resigned in 2016 to direct the Astan Quds Razavi Foundation. In this capacity he was responsible for the mass distribution of the infamous anti-semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a documentary entitled The Devil's Plan about how the Jews have "codified from past centuries the most complete plan for demonic world domination" and should be destroyed.

In February 2017, Raisi announced that he would run for President against incumbent Hassan Rouhani. He ran on a hardline position of sex segregation, censorship of Western media and Islamization of media; however, despite his support of sex segregation he is relatively progressive by Iranian standards, believing that men and women play different but equally important roles in society and that no-one has the right to suppress the freedom of women. Although he garnered a lot of popular support in the election, he came second with only 38.8% of the vote. Raisi did not take his loss well, accusing Rouhani of multiple electoral violations and demanding the Guardian Council investigate his victory.

In 2021, Rouhani stepped down due to Iran-s two-term limit. Raisi announced that he would run for president again, winning with 62% of the vote. He took power on 3 August. The election was rife with accusations of rigging by Supreme Leader Khamenei due to 3.7 million votes not being counted and journalists critical of Raisi allegedly being threatened by police. The United States of America decried Raisi's victory as a sham.

Upon taking power, Raisi was criticized for appointing Ahmad Vahidi and Mohsen Rezaee, who are wanted by Interpol for involvement in the 1994 AMIA bombing, to his cabinet. Raisi did not attend the 2021 Cop26 climate change summit in Glasgow after being threatened with arrest for his involvement in the 1988 executions if he entered the United Kingdom. In 2022 he pledged Iran's support for Russian President Vladimir Putin in his illegal invasion of Ukraine. He also promised an investigation into the death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman who was beaten to death by police for wearing her headscarf incorrectly, before using the police to violently repress protests over Amini's death.

Raisi has been tipped by many journalists as Khamenei's successor as Supreme Leader.

On 19 May 2024, Raisi, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and several other officials were killed when Raisi's helicopter crashed near the village of Uzi in East Azerbaijan province. Iran's semi-official news agency, Mehr News, described them as having been "martyred in the crash." Raisi was the second president of Iran to have died in office, following Mohammad-Ali Rajai, who died in a 1981 bombing.