Supreme Leader of Iran leads funeral in memory of the late president Raisi

 Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei led mass funeral prayers for President Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash. Hamas militants praised Raisi's support for Palestinian attacks.

In the wake of the tragedy, thousands of people attended the ceremony in Tehran to pay their respect to the deceased including President Ebrahim Raisi, the late general, and several others in a helicopter that crashed near the border of Azerbaijan on Sunday.

Then serving as Iran’s president, a hardline cleric who assumed office in 2021, Raisi, along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and six other passengers, perished in a helicopter crash. I have seen pictures of Khamenei bowing over covered coffins with the Iranian flag on it during a ceremony at Tehran University while the acting president and other high-ranking commanders of the Revolutionary Guard were crying out loud.

“Oh Allah, we did not witness any evil from him,” Khamenei said of Raisi, during the Arabic prayers for the dead.

In the prayer, people chanted “Death to America” and then took the coffins to Azadi Square in Tehran where Raisi had given some of his most important speeches. The corpses will be flown home to Mashhad for burial on Thursday according to the family’s wishes.

One of the people present was Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Palestinian Sunni militant organization Hamas which Iran supports and provides with weapons and money. Haniyeh also appreciated the actions of Raisi to support Palestinian militants and their actions against the Israeli state.

The funeral also revealed the impact of Raisi’s tenure as an Islamic judge. Like many other judges during the 1980s, he was responsible for signing death penalties for thousands of political prisoners. As president, he violently suppressed demonstrators after a 2022 protest in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police.

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But he also had the large support of the conservatives who appreciated the strong stances he took. Some believe his passing may have led to Khamenei being able to select a president more conforming to his wishes before he died of natural causes sometime in his mid-eighties.