Late President Ebrahim Raisi laid to rest at Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad
Iran’s late President Ebrahim Raisi was laid to rest in his hometown of Mashhad that hosts the holy shrine of the eighth Shia imam, Imam Reza (AS), the state-run IRNA news agency reports.
The body of Raisi arrived in Mashhad on Thursday morning, with huge crowds of people gathering for his funeral procession that reached Imam Reza’s holy shrine where the late president was laid to rest.
According to Mohammad-Reza Ghalandar, the mayor of Mashhad, an estimated three million people have taken part in the mourning ceremony, including those from other Iranian cities as well as neighboring countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkiye.
Raisi, his foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and several more officials lost their lives on Sunday when their helicopter crashed in Iran’s northwestern province of East Azarbaijan. They were en route to the provincial capital Tabriz from the border with the Azerbaijan Republic, where Raisi had inaugurated a joint dam with his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev.
Funeral processions were also held for the martyrs on Tuesday and Wednesday in the cities of Tabriz and Qom and the capital Tehran. Dozens of top officials from other countries attended a memorial ceremony in Tehran on Wednesday afternoon as well.
Raisi, 63, was the eighth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, who was elected in August 2021. Before that, he was in charge of Iran’s Judiciary, and was a member of the Expediency Council and the vice chairman of the Assembly of Experts, as well as the custodian of Astan Quds Razavi.
