Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and several other officials were found dead on Monday, hours after their helicopter crashed in a foggy, mountainous region of the country’s northwest, state media reported. The crash comes as the Middle East remains unsettled by the Israel-Hamas war, during which Raisi, who was 63, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel just last month. During Raisi's term in office, Iran enriched uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels, further escalating tensions with the West as Tehran also supplied bomb-carrying drones to Russia for its war in Ukraine and armed militia groups across the region.
True, the weather was really bad in that area, but he was traveling in a 3-helicopter convoy, and only his helicopter crashed. Now, I’m not saying that it’s impossible, or even improbable that it was an accident, but we can’t really rule out sabotage at this point, especially considering how big of a target he had on his head from both the US and Israel. Personally, I really hope it was an accident. I mean, I shed no tears for that son of a bitch, but the ramifications if this was an assassination are unsettling.
We can’t rule it out, but Occam’s razor says we should think of it as an accident right up until the moment where we find evidence for sabotage and an accident isn’t enough anymore to explain it.