What we know so far about incident involving helicopter carrying Iran president

The apparent crash of a helicopter carrying Iran’s president and foreign minister on Sunday has sent shock waves around the region.

Details remained scant in the hours after the incident, and it was unclear if Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and the other officials had survived.

Here is what we know so far.

– Who was on board the helicopter and where were they going?
The helicopter was carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

Mr Raisi was returning from a trip to Iran’s border with Azerbaijan earlier on Sunday to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, the news agency said.

– What is the status of the search operations?
Iranian officials have said the mountainous, forested terrain and heavy fog impeded search-and-rescue operations. The president of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, Pir-Hossein Koulivand, said 40 search teams were on the ground in the area despite “challenging weather conditions”. The search is being done by teams on the ground, as “the weather conditions have made it impossible to conduct aerial searches” via drones, Mr Koulivand said, according to IRNA.

– If Ebrahim Raisi died in the crash, how might this impact Iran?
Mr Raisi is seen as a protege to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a potential successor for his position within the country’s Shiite theocracy. Under the Iranian constitution, if he died, the country’s first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, would become president. Mr Khamenei has publicly assured Iranians that there would be “no disruption to the operations of the country” as a result of the crash.

Saudi Arabia, which is traditionally a rival of Iran although the two countries have recently made a rapprochement, also expressed concern in a statement and said it “stands by Iran in these difficult circumstances”. There was no immediate official reaction from Israel. Last month, following an Israeli strike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus that killed two Iranian generals, Tehran launched hundreds of missiles and drones at Israel. They were mostly shot down and tensions have apparently since subsided.