Ebrahim Raisi: rescuers search for Iran president after helicopter crash – live updates | Israel-Gaza war

• A rescue operation is continuing in the mountains close to the Iranian-Azerbaijani border after one of the helicopters in a convoy carrying Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, was involved in a “hard landing” on Sunday, according to Iranian state media.

• The helicopter that crashed has been found by search teams, Iranian state TV reported. There is no update yet on the condition of those onboard. However, Iran’s Red Crescent humanitarian movement has denied the state TV report. The location of the helicopter is still unknown.

• The incident, which involved one helicopter in a convoy of three, was described by Iranian state television as an accident.

• An unnamed Iranian official told Reuters that the lives of the president and his foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, were “at risk” after a “crash” as it was crossing mountain terrain in heavy fog.

• An unnamed Iranian official told state media that contact had been made on several occasions with a passenger and a crew member, but there have been no further updates.

• Three rescue workers searching for the crashed helicopter were reported missing by the Red Crescent but were later accounted for. A spokesperson said the search and rescue operation will slow down as the weather is expected to get “severely cold” soon with more rain forecast.

• Raisi was travelling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. State TV described the area of the helicopter incident as being near Jolfa, a city on the border with Azerbaijan. The president had been in Azerbaijan earlier on Sunday to inaugurate a dam with the country’s president Ilham Aliyev. The dam is the third one that the two nations have built on the Aras River.

• Iran’s army chief of staff said all army resources will be used for the search and rescue operations, state TV reported. Maj Gen Mohammad Bagheri has also ordered guards to take part in the search efforts, it said.

• Iraq has instructed its interior ministry, the Red Crescent and other relevant bodies to offer help to neighbouring Iran and assist in the search. Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates also offered support.

Patrick Wintour

The Iranian helicopter crash comes at a time when the country, faced by unprecedented external challenges, was already bracing itself for a change in regime with the expected demise in the next few years of its 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In the country’s hydra-headed leadership where power is spread in often opaque ways between clerics, politicians and army, it is the supreme leader, and not the president, that is ultimately decisive.

Indeed, in some ways the posts of president, and prime minister – originally based on a model of the French constitution – became overwhelmed in the drafting of Iran’s constitution in 1979, leading to advocates of a more powerful presidency to claim the role was being subsumed in a form of autocracy created in the name of religion.

Peter Beaumont

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who is missing in Iran’s mountains after a helicopter crash near the border with Azerbaijan, is a hardliner who was instrumental in the last few years in steering Iran back towards the more uncompromising beliefs of the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary founders.

A supporter of deeply conservative values on the domestic front, in terms of foreign policy Raisi also carved out an increasingly aggressive stance, and it was on his watch that Tehran opted to launch its recent unprecedented missile and drone strike against Israel bringing the two countries into direct and open conflict for the first time.

While he was elected president in June 2021, having represented himself as the best person to fight corruption and Iran’s economic problems, Raisi had long occupied important positions in Iran, including an allegedkey role in the so-called Death Committee responsible for executing thousands of prisoners in the 1980s, a claim he has denied.

The helicopter that crashed has been found by search teams, Iranian state TV reported. There is no update yet on the condition of those onboard.