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Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily Odds. It's Tuesday, the twenty first of May.
I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Yesterday morning, we heard that a helicopter carrying Iran's president and foreign minister had crashed.
By the middle of the day our time.
The wreckage of the helicopter had been found, with state media confirming that there were no survivors from the crash.
Breaking news out of Iran or state media has now confirmed the death of President Ibrahim Raisi and the country's foreign minister after a deadly helicopter crash.
Iran state media has confirmed the deaths of Presidents Abrahim Raisi and his foreign minister in the helicopter crash. In today's Deep Dive, we're going to discuss what we know so far about the helicopter crash, the leaders who were on the helice, and what exactly happens next in Iran. Before we get there, though, Sam, what's making headlines.
University of Melbourne student protesters have been urged to vacate a pro Palestinian encampment or risk expulsion. The university has also threatened to get Victoria police involved if students do not cooperate with its demands. Students at the encampment in the university's Arts West building received a notice from the
University of Melbourne to vacate the area last week. The university has threatened students with not being allowed to re enroll, attend classes, city exams, and access university facilities.
Australian authorities say they've been unable to send flights to evacuate citizens from New Caledonia, where a state of emergency has been declared. Violent protests broke out after changes to local voting rules in the French territory were proposed. P M Anthony Albernezi called the situation deeply concerning and that the situation on the ground was preventing flights from coming and going. The Prime Minister said he's working with French authorities to send evacuation flights to the region.
Australian Federal police have charged a man who allegedly tried to open a plane door mid flight. Flight attendants were able to restrain the Canadian man after he tried to open the emergency exit door two hours into an international service. He's facing up to five thousand dollars in fines and could be sentenced to jail time.
And today's good news, a ninety year old man has flown to space, sixty years after he became the first black person to be trained as an astronaut in the US. Ed Dwight made history in nineteen sixty one after being selected for training by then US President JFK, but he never had the opportunity to go to space. In twenty twenty four, he finally made it with a private mission of six people.
Okay, Zara, this is a really big story. There's going to be far reaching implications. It's pretty hard to tell exactly what the implications are going to be right now. So why don't we start with what exactly we do know, which is what happened. It's obviously changing hour by hour, But keeping all of that in mind, tell me what we know about this helicopter crash.
Okay, so Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hassein Amir Abda Lakhyan were traveling from neighboring Azerbaijan after the opening ceremony of a new dam on both of the country's borders. Now, state media reports differ on where exactly the helicopter did go down, but the majority of reports suggests that it went down on the slope of a
steep mountain peak near the city of Varsigan. So when we woke up on Monday morning in Australia, we knew that the helicopter had crashed, but there was no information on what had happened to the passengers that were on board. The crash triggered an immediate search and rescue effort, and there were multiple countries who were involved in this rescue effort. We know for sure that Russia and Turkey both were and they were offering resources and personnel to help locate
the missing helicopter. We know that it was especially difficult for these rescue missions because of heavy fog, and also, as I said, we believe that the helicopter went down on a mountain range, so that kind of mountainous terrain made it incredibly difficult.
You can even tell from the photographs how dense that fogg.
Yes, exactly, So for over twelve hours, rescue teams couldn't find anything at all, any trace.
Of this helicopter or the people who were on it.
Then on Monday afternoon, our time, Turkish drones showed heat maps believed to be the wreckage of the missing helicopter. It was then that the rescue teams alerted Iranian state media to the discovery.
At that point, the head of Iran's Red Crescent.
Society, who was at the site of the crash, said to State TV that quote, the situation was very bad.
And the news was not good.
Within hours, Iranian authorities had confirmed that both Rayisi and Amer Abda Lahian were dead.
He walk me through that timeline. It strikes me just how remarkable it is that there's this twelve hour window where they.
Could It was a really long time.
I mean from when we woke up, we already knew it had been missing for hours, and it then took almost half a day then.
But these are two of the most high profile political figures in the whole country. The fact that they were lost for twelve hours after their helicopter crashed is remarkable and not unsurprisingly, this has been leading the news across the world for the last twenty four hours. So for people not familiar with Iran's leadership system, can you give me a sense of who exactly the two men who died in the crash were Yeah.
So let me quickly get into how Iran's system of governance works. So, Iran is ruled by what's called a supreme leader. That is Ayatola ale Khomeni. He's eighty five years old and he's been in power since nineteen eighty nine. Now, the Ayatola has oversight over most aspects of Iranian life and decision making. There's not really a comparison that I can think of in Western nations, but he is this kind of all bearing supreme leader.
The buck stops with him.
But second to the Ayatollah is the president, who is the top elected official in Iran. Now, a president in Iran is like a president elsewhere, responsible for day to day government operations and for appointing ministers. So onto this specific president, as I said, his name was Ibrahim Raisi. He was elected as the president of Iran in twenty twenty one. Before his presidency, he was the head of Iran's court system, so he was the highest legal authority
in the country's judiciary. Now, in terms of taking a bird's eye view of him, human rights scripts have linked him to wide scale killings of the regime's opponents. And to give you a sense of his background following the Iran Iraq War in the eighties race he was on a sentencing panel that ordered the executions of as many as five thousand political prison That was according to Amnesty International. Interestingly, President Rasi was recently made a member of the council to.
Decide who will succeed the Ayatola in his death.
As I said, he's in his late eighties and he I'm referring there to Raisi was considered a pretty strong candidate. So that is President Raysi and the other person who we know was on board the plane was Iran's foreign minister, saying Amir Abdallahian now.
Spoken about him on the podcast, right.
Yeah, exactly.
We would have mentioned his name a bit over the last few months because he's been quoted in the context of these escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, and we'll get to that in a bit. But he has been the country's foreign minister since twenty twenty one, so again, a really really significant figure in Iran's political system.
So I have two major leaders of any country died in a single accident, there would be some serious questions around you know, what happens next to the political systems in that country, let alone a country like Iran who is in the middle of some very serious global tensions. What will happen next here?
I mean on a kind of very logistical level, the vice president, Mohammed Makhba is expected to take over from Raci as interim president, and then Iran's constitution requires a presidential election to be held within fifty days. So before the men were confirmed dead, the Ayatola said that the administration of the country will not be disrupted. But as you said, this is a really complex time in Iran's history.
There's kind of these dual complexities, so thinking internationally, as I said earlier, this incident has come in the context of huge unrest in the Middle East, with Iran playing a fairly major role in the conflict between Israel and Kamas. We've seen Iran and Israel directly strike one another for the first time in history. We've never seen tensions escalate
that dramatically before. And then we've also got Iran supporting proxies, so again that's financially supporting equipping other groups in other countries on their behalf. So Iran is very involved in this war. And again Amid these kind of rising tensions. This is a very complex time for Iran in the kind of geopolitical context of the Middle East.
And I think that regional significance really gives us a sense of why everyone around the world from a government point of view, was really invested in what happens here. But then there's a whole nother narrative around the people of Iran, right.
Yeah, And I mean this is always the way that there is obviously a kind of foreign reality and then a domestic reality. And internally there has been great unrest in Iran too. There have been ongoing protests against Iran's religious leadership that's been mostly led by young women in the wake of the twenty twenty two death of Masar Amini.
And I believe we've probably spoken about this before, but these protests erupted in Iran after Amini died following her arrest by the Regimes Morality Police, and they're the people who enforce these strict cultural laws, including a law requiring women to cover their hair.
Protesters have used the.
Slogan woman Life Freedom, and these protesters were demanding an end to the restrictive laws and they wanted to overthrow the government, and while the intensity of those protests has died down a bit, the message still remains clear that there is great civil unrest and that there is this kind of movement being led by young women domestically in
Iran against the country's religious leadership. Now, according to AP, the security crackdown that's followed those protests has resulted in more than five hundred people being killed and twenty two thousand people being detained. And so it's amid that context that we saw in the hours after news first broke of the helicopter crash, this footage on social media that showed some Iranian people taking to the streets to celebrate.
I mean, at that point they didn't know what had happened, but there were these really significant celebrations, people filming themselves out on the streets or in their home celebrating what they believe to be the death of fairly significant leaders in Iran. I should add, though, that absolutely wasn't everyone, and there were some Iranians who followed the Ayatolla's commands to pray for the president, and so we saw people gathering at mosques there to carry out that prayer.
Yeah, so you have a very complex global and domestic situation. That domestic situation is really interesting. There's also a whole nother economic angle to all of this. I mean, Iran has been the center of sanctions for a while now from a lot of the countries in the West, and those countries will be looking to see what the succession of power looks like in reevaluating that relationship or keeping it the same. What we do know is that we still have a lot of questions around what happens next
and what exactly has happened here. Will bring everybody an update on this story when we learn a little bit more. For now, though, that gives us a sense of where things stand. Thanks so much for joining us on the Daily os this morning. If you're listening to this podcast on Apple or Spotify, would love you to rate this podcast. It really helps us grow and really helps our independent
media company. We'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calkatin woman from Gadighl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all.
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