Dubai- Iran interred late President Ebrahim Raisi at the holiest shrine in the nation on Thursday, days after a fatal helicopter crash killed him along with the country’s foreign minister and six others.
Mourners lowered Raisi into a tomb at the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad, where Shia Islam’s eighth imam is buried and millions of pilgrims visit each year. Hundreds of thousands of people dressed in black crowded around the sprawling marble floored shrine under its iconic golden dome, wailing and beating their chests in sorrow in a sign of mourning common in Shia ceremonies.
Raisi, who was 63, had been discussed as a possible successor to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei. Iran has set June 28 as the next presidential election. For now, there’s no clear favorite for the position among Iran’s political elite.
Acting President Mohammad Mokhber, a relatively lesser known first vice president until Sunday’s crash, has stepped into his role and also attended a meeting between Ayatollah Khamenei and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Wednesday.
Mashhad has long been a base for Raisi. In 2016, Raisi was appointed to run the Imam Reza charity foundation, which manages a vast conglomerate of businesses and endowments in Iran, as well as oversees the shrine. It is one of many bonyads, or charitable foundations, fueled by donations or assets seized after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These foundations offer no public accounting of their spending and answer only to Iran’s supreme leader. The Imam Reza charity, known as “Astan-e Quds-e Razavi” in Farsi, is believed to be one of the biggest in the country. Analysts estimate its worth at tens of billions of dollars as it owns almost half the land in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city that’s about 750 kilometers east of Iran’s capital.
Raisi is the first top politician in the country to be buried at the shrine, which represents a major honor for the cleric. His father-in-law serves as the city’s Friday prayer leader.
The deaths of Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian come as Iran remains a lead player in the wider Mideast backing resistance groups fighting to end dominance of Israel and the United States. Mourners have chanted against both nations in the ceremonies.
State media circulated photos Thursday showing a meeting between Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard chief and the head of its expeditionary Quds Force and representatives from Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Thursday morning, thousands in black gathered along a main boulevard in the city of Birjand, where Raisi once served as its member of the Assembly of Experts in Iran’s South Khorasan province along the Afghan border. There and in Mashhad, mourners on the streets reached out to a truck carrying his casket, with some tossing scarves and other items against it for a blessing.
Meanwhile, former Foreign Ministers Mohammad Javad Zarif and Ali Akbar Salehi and other dignitaries paid respects to Amirabdollahian at Iran’s Foreign Ministry, where his casket was put on display. His body later was interred in Shahr-e Rey just outside of Tehran at the Abdol Azim shrine, another final resting place for those famed in Persian history.
“Give Soleimani our greetings,” a religious singer said as Amirabdollahian’s body was placed inside its final resting place, referring to the slain general assassinated by the United States in Iraq.
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