Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line protégé of the country’s supreme leader who helped oversee the mass executions of thousands in 1988 earning himself the nickname ‘The Butcher of Tehran‘, has died aged 63.
Elected president in 2021, he went on to lead the country as it enriched uranium near weapons-grade levels and launched a major drone-and-missile attack on Israel.
Raisi’s sudden death, along with Iran‘s foreign minister and other officials in the helicopter crash, came as the country struggles with internal dissent and its relations with the wider world.
A cleric first, Raisi once kissed the Quran, the Islamic holy book, before the UN and spoke more like a preacher than a statesman when addressing the world.
But he gained notoriety after he was appointed Deputy prosecutor of Tehran in 1985 before going on to serve on the prosecution committee which – under the orders of then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – sentenced thousands of political prisoners to death.
The series of mass executions began on July 19, 1988 and lasted almost five months across 32 cities. Estimates of the number killed range between 2,500 and 30,000.
Raisi was one of four members of the commission, which later became known as the ‘Death Committee’, who were later identified by Amnesty International as having participated in the massacre.
The killings came after Iran’s then-Supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered cease-fire in 1988, ending an eight-year holy war against Iraq.
This prompted members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, to storm across the Iranian border from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran blunted their assault.
The trials began around that time, with defendants asked to identify themselves.
Those who responded ‘mujahedeen’ were sent to their deaths, while others were questioned about their willingness to ‘clear minefields for the army of the Islamic Republic,’ according to a 1990 Amnesty International report…..S££ MOR£
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