Thousands of mourners turned out in Iranian city of Tabriz on Tuesday (May 21) to mourn President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash near the Azerbaijan border on the weekend along with his foreign minister and seven others. - REUTERS
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00:00 Thousands of mourners descended on the Iranian city of Tabriz on Tuesday to mourn President
00:08 Ibrahim Raisi. He was killed in a helicopter crash near the Azerbaijan border on Sunday,
00:15 along with his foreign minister and seven others.
00:17 State TV broadcast images showing many dressed in black, crowding a truck covered in white flowers,
00:24 which carried caskets wrapped in Iran's national flag. Mourners carried posters of Raisi,
00:30 foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and other officials who were killed in the crash.
00:34 Despite the turnout, some insiders see a stark contrast in public grief
00:42 compared to past commemorations for the deaths of other senior figures in the Islamic Republic's
00:46 45-year history. Iran proclaimed five days of mourning for Raisi, but there was little of
00:52 the emotional rhetoric that accompanied the death of Qasem Soleimani, a senior commander
00:57 of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards killed by a U.S. missile in 2020 in Iraq.
01:03 His funeral drew huge crowds of mourners, weeping with sorrow and rage.
01:07 The helicopter crash that killed Raisi also comes at a time of deepening crisis
01:13 between the clerical leadership and society at large.
01:16 Major issues range from the tightening of social and political controls to economic hardship.
01:23 The mood bodes ill for an early presidential election on June 28.
01:26 Iran's rulers will hope they can stir up enough public enthusiasm to secure high participation
01:32 in the vote, after a historically low turnout of around 41 percent in March's parliamentary election.
01:38 Widespread public anger at worsening living standards and pervasive graft may keep many
01:45 Iranians at home, as well as memories of the handling of nationwide unrest sparked by the
01:50 death of a young Iranian Kurdish woman in 2022 while in custody.
01:55 Raisi's body was flown from Tabriz, the closest major city to the remote crash site,
02:00 to Tehran airport before heading to the holy Shiite Muslim city of Qom.
02:04 It will then return to lie at Tehran's Grand Masala Mosque
02:10 before being transferred to his hometown of Mashhad for burial on Thursday.