Yahoo TV

STORY: Thousands of mourners descended on the Iranian city of Tabriz on Tuesday (May 21) to mourn President Ebrahim Raisi.

He was killed in a helicopter crash near the Azerbaijan border on Sunday along with his foreign minister and seven others.

State TV broadcast images showing many dressed in black, crowding a truck covered in white flowers which carried caskets wrapped in Iran's national flag.

Mourners carried posters of Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, and other officials who were killed in the crash.

Despite the turnout, some insiders see a stark contrast in public grief compared to past commemorations for the deaths of other senior figures in the Islamic Republic's 45-year history.

Iran proclaimed five days of mourning for Raisi.

But there was little of the emotional rhetoric that accompanied the death of Qasem Soleimani, a senior commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards killed by a U.S. missile in 2020 in Iraq.

His funeral drew huge crowds of mourners, weeping with sorrow and rage.

The helicopter crash that killed Raisi also comes at a time of deepening crisis between the clerical leadership and society at large.

Major issues range from the tightening of social and political controls to economic hardship.

The mood bodes ill for an early presidential election on June 28.

Iran's rulers will hope they can stir up enough public enthusiasm to secure high participation in the vote, after a historically low turnout of around 41% in March's parliamentary election.

Widespread public anger at worsening living standards and pervasive graft may keep many Iranians at home.

As well as memories of the handling of nationwide unrest, sparked by the death of a young Iranian-Kurdish woman in 2022 while in custody.

Raisi's body was flown from Tabriz, the closest major city to the remote crash site, to Tehran airport before heading to the holy Shi'ite Muslim city of Qom.

It will then return to lie at Tehran's Grand Mosalla Mosque before being transferred to his hometown of Mashahd for burial on Thursday (May 23).