What could President Raisi’s death mean for stability in Iran and beyond? Expert Q&A

A helicopter carrying Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s foreign minister and other officials crashed in the mountainous north-west reaches of Iran on Sunday May 19, sparking a rescue operation in thick fog and driving rain. On Monday, search and rescue teams reached the crash site and “found no signs of the helicopter’s occupants being alive”.

The death of Raisi and his foreign minister will shake up Iranian politics. Who was Raisi? What happens now? And what could his death mean for stability in the country and beyond? We spoke with Scott Lucas, a Middle East scholar at University College Dublin, who has been writing about tensions in the Middle East for many years.

Who was Ebrahim Raisi?

Raisi was a dedicated servant of Iran’s former supreme leader (the country’s highest authority), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Rising through the judicial system in the 1980s, Raisi came to prominence as a member of the “death committee” imposing capital punishment on thousands of detainees in 1988 at the end of the Iran’s war with Iraq.