Speaker 1: Already and this this is the DAILYA.
Speaker 2: This is the Daily os.
Speaker 3: Oh, now it makes sense.
Speaker 4: Good morning and welcome to the Daily Odds. It's Tuesday,
Speaker 4: the twenty first of May.
Speaker 1: I'm Zara, I'm Sam.
Speaker 4: Yesterday morning, we heard that a helicopter carrying Iran's president
Speaker 4: and foreign minister had crashed.
Speaker 3: By the middle of the day our time.
Speaker 4: The wreckage of the helicopter had been found, with state
Speaker 4: media confirming that there were no survivors from the crash.
Speaker 2: Breaking news out of Iran or state media has now
Speaker 2: confirmed the death of President Ibrahim Raisi and the country's
Speaker 2: foreign minister after a deadly helicopter crash.
Speaker 4: Iran state media has confirmed the deaths of Presidents Abrahim
Speaker 4: Raisi and his foreign minister in the helicopter crash. In
Speaker 4: today's Deep Dive, we're going to discuss what we know
Speaker 4: so far about the helicopter crash, the leaders who were
Speaker 4: on the helice, and what exactly happens next in Iran.
Speaker 4: Before we get there, though, Sam, what's making headlines.
Speaker 1: University of Melbourne student protesters have been urged to vacate
Speaker 1: a pro Palestinian encampment or risk expulsion. The university has
Speaker 1: also threatened to get Victoria police involved if students do
Speaker 1: not cooperate with its demands. Students at the encampment in
Speaker 1: the university's Arts West building received a notice from the
Speaker 1: University of Melbourne to vacate the area last week. The
Speaker 1: university has threatened students with not being allowed to re enroll,
Speaker 1: attend classes, city exams, and access university facilities.
Speaker 4: Australian authorities say they've been unable to send flights to
Speaker 4: evacuate citizens from New Caledonia, where a state of emergency
Speaker 4: has been declared. Violent protests broke out after changes to
Speaker 4: local voting rules in the French territory were proposed. P
Speaker 4: M Anthony Albernezi called the situation deeply concerning and that
Speaker 4: the situation on the ground was preventing flights from coming
Speaker 4: and going. The Prime Minister said he's working with French
Speaker 4: authorities to send evacuation flights to the region.
Speaker 1: Australian Federal police have charged a man who allegedly tried
Speaker 1: to open a plane door mid flight. Flight attendants were
Speaker 1: able to restrain the Canadian man after he tried to
Speaker 1: open the emergency exit door two hours into an international service.
Speaker 1: He's facing up to five thousand dollars in fines and
Speaker 1: could be sentenced to jail time.
Speaker 4: And today's good news, a ninety year old man has
Speaker 4: flown to space, sixty years after he became the first
Speaker 4: black person to be trained as an astronaut in the US.
Speaker 4: Ed Dwight made history in nineteen sixty one after being
Speaker 4: selected for training by then US President JFK, but he
Speaker 4: never had the opportunity to go to space. In twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four, he finally made it with a private mission
Speaker 4: of six people.
Speaker 1: Okay, Zara, this is a really big story. There's going
Speaker 1: to be far reaching implications. It's pretty hard to tell
Speaker 1: exactly what the implications are going to be right now.
Speaker 1: So why don't we start with what exactly we do know,
Speaker 1: which is what happened. It's obviously changing hour by hour,
Speaker 1: But keeping all of that in mind, tell me what
Speaker 1: we know about this helicopter crash.
Speaker 4: Okay, so Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hassein
Speaker 4: Amir Abda Lakhyan were traveling from neighboring Azerbaijan after the
Speaker 4: opening ceremony of a new dam on both of the
Speaker 4: country's borders. Now, state media reports differ on where exactly
Speaker 4: the helicopter did go down, but the majority of reports
Speaker 4: suggests that it went down on the slope of a
Speaker 4: steep mountain peak near the city of Varsigan. So when
Speaker 4: we woke up on Monday morning in Australia, we knew
Speaker 4: that the helicopter had crashed, but there was no information
Speaker 4: on what had happened to the passengers that were on board.
Speaker 4: The crash triggered an immediate search and rescue effort, and
Speaker 4: there were multiple countries who were involved in this rescue effort.
Speaker 4: We know for sure that Russia and Turkey both were
Speaker 4: and they were offering resources and personnel to help locate
Speaker 4: the missing helicopter. We know that it was especially difficult
Speaker 4: for these rescue missions because of heavy fog, and also,
Speaker 4: as I said, we believe that the helicopter went down
Speaker 4: on a mountain range, so that kind of mountainous terrain
Speaker 4: made it incredibly difficult.
Speaker 1: You can even tell from the photographs how dense that fogg.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, So for over twelve hours, rescue teams couldn't
Speaker 4: find anything at all, any trace.
Speaker 3: Of this helicopter or the people who were on it.
Speaker 4: Then on Monday afternoon, our time, Turkish drones showed heat
Speaker 4: maps believed to be the wreckage of the missing helicopter.
Speaker 4: It was then that the rescue teams alerted Iranian state
Speaker 4: media to the discovery.
Speaker 3: At that point, the head of Iran's Red Crescent.
Speaker 4: Society, who was at the site of the crash, said
Speaker 4: to State TV that quote, the situation was very bad.
Speaker 3: And the news was not good.
Speaker 4: Within hours, Iranian authorities had confirmed that both Rayisi and
Speaker 4: Amer Abda Lahian were dead.
Speaker 1: He walk me through that timeline. It strikes me just
Speaker 1: how remarkable it is that there's this twelve hour window
Speaker 1: where they.
Speaker 3: Could It was a really long time.
Speaker 4: I mean from when we woke up, we already knew
Speaker 4: it had been missing for hours, and it then took
Speaker 4: almost half a day then.
Speaker 1: But these are two of the most high profile political
Speaker 1: figures in the whole country. The fact that they were
Speaker 1: lost for twelve hours after their helicopter crashed is remarkable
Speaker 1: and not unsurprisingly, this has been leading the news across
Speaker 1: the world for the last twenty four hours. So for
Speaker 1: people not familiar with Iran's leadership system, can you give
Speaker 1: me a sense of who exactly the two men who
Speaker 1: died in the crash were Yeah.
Speaker 4: So let me quickly get into how Iran's system of
Speaker 4: governance works. So, Iran is ruled by what's called a
Speaker 4: supreme leader. That is Ayatola ale Khomeni. He's eighty five
Speaker 4: years old and he's been in power since nineteen eighty nine. Now,
Speaker 4: the Ayatola has oversight over most aspects of Iranian life
Speaker 4: and decision making. There's not really a comparison that I
Speaker 4: can think of in Western nations, but he is this
Speaker 4: kind of all bearing supreme leader.
Speaker 3: The buck stops with him.
Speaker 4: But second to the Ayatollah is the president, who is
Speaker 4: the top elected official in Iran. Now, a president in
Speaker 4: Iran is like a president elsewhere, responsible for day to
Speaker 4: day government operations and for appointing ministers. So onto this
Speaker 4: specific president, as I said, his name was Ibrahim Raisi.
Speaker 4: He was elected as the president of Iran in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one. Before his presidency, he was the head of
Speaker 4: Iran's court system, so he was the highest legal authority
Speaker 4: in the country's judiciary. Now, in terms of taking a
Speaker 4: bird's eye view of him, human rights scripts have linked
Speaker 4: him to wide scale killings of the regime's opponents. And
Speaker 4: to give you a sense of his background following the
Speaker 4: Iran Iraq War in the eighties race he was on
Speaker 4: a sentencing panel that ordered the executions of as many
Speaker 4: as five thousand political prison That was according to Amnesty International. Interestingly,
Speaker 4: President Rasi was recently made a member of the council to.
Speaker 3: Decide who will succeed the Ayatola in his death.
Speaker 4: As I said, he's in his late eighties and he
Speaker 4: I'm referring there to Raisi was considered a pretty strong candidate.
Speaker 4: So that is President Raysi and the other person who
Speaker 4: we know was on board the plane was Iran's foreign minister,
Speaker 4: saying Amir Abdallahian now.
Speaker 1: Spoken about him on the podcast, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: We would have mentioned his name a bit over the
Speaker 4: last few months because he's been quoted in the context
Speaker 4: of these escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, and we'll
Speaker 4: get to that in a bit. But he has been
Speaker 4: the country's foreign minister since twenty twenty one, so again,
Speaker 4: a really really significant figure in Iran's political system.
Speaker 1: So I have two major leaders of any country died
Speaker 1: in a single accident, there would be some serious questions
Speaker 1: around you know, what happens next to the political systems
Speaker 1: in that country, let alone a country like Iran who
Speaker 1: is in the middle of some very serious global tensions.
Speaker 1: What will happen next here?
Speaker 4: I mean on a kind of very logistical level, the
Speaker 4: vice president, Mohammed Makhba is expected to take over from
Speaker 4: Raci as interim president, and then Iran's constitution requires a
Speaker 4: presidential election to be held within fifty days. So before
Speaker 4: the men were confirmed dead, the Ayatola said that the
Speaker 4: administration of the country will not be disrupted. But as
Speaker 4: you said, this is a really complex time in Iran's history.
Speaker 4: There's kind of these dual complexities, so thinking internationally, as
Speaker 4: I said earlier, this incident has come in the context
Speaker 4: of huge unrest in the Middle East, with Iran playing
Speaker 4: a fairly major role in the conflict between Israel and Kamas.
Speaker 4: We've seen Iran and Israel directly strike one another for
Speaker 4: the first time in history. We've never seen tensions escalate
Speaker 4: that dramatically before. And then we've also got Iran supporting proxies,
Speaker 4: so again that's financially supporting equipping other groups in other
Speaker 4: countries on their behalf. So Iran is very involved in
Speaker 4: this war. And again Amid these kind of rising tensions.
Speaker 4: This is a very complex time for Iran in the
Speaker 4: kind of geopolitical context of the Middle East.
Speaker 1: And I think that regional significance really gives us a
Speaker 1: sense of why everyone around the world from a government
Speaker 1: point of view, was really invested in what happens here.
Speaker 1: But then there's a whole nother narrative around the people
Speaker 1: of Iran, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean this is always the way that
Speaker 4: there is obviously a kind of foreign reality and then
Speaker 4: a domestic reality. And internally there has been great unrest
Speaker 4: in Iran too. There have been ongoing protests against Iran's
Speaker 4: religious leadership that's been mostly led by young women in
Speaker 4: the wake of the twenty twenty two death of Masar Amini.
Speaker 4: And I believe we've probably spoken about this before, but
Speaker 4: these protests erupted in Iran after Amini died following her
Speaker 4: arrest by the Regimes Morality Police, and they're the people
Speaker 4: who enforce these strict cultural laws, including a law requiring
Speaker 4: women to cover their hair.
Speaker 3: Protesters have used the.
Speaker 4: Slogan woman Life Freedom, and these protesters were demanding an
Speaker 4: end to the restrictive laws and they wanted to overthrow
Speaker 4: the government, and while the intensity of those protests has
Speaker 4: died down a bit, the message still remains clear that
Speaker 4: there is great civil unrest and that there is this
Speaker 4: kind of movement being led by young women domestically in
Speaker 4: Iran against the country's religious leadership. Now, according to AP,
Speaker 4: the security crackdown that's followed those protests has resulted in
Speaker 4: more than five hundred people being killed and twenty two
Speaker 4: thousand people being detained. And so it's amid that context
Speaker 4: that we saw in the hours after news first broke
Speaker 4: of the helicopter crash, this footage on social media that
Speaker 4: showed some Iranian people taking to the streets to celebrate.
Speaker 4: I mean, at that point they didn't know what had happened,
Speaker 4: but there were these really significant celebrations, people filming themselves
Speaker 4: out on the streets or in their home celebrating what
Speaker 4: they believe to be the death of fairly significant leaders
Speaker 4: in Iran. I should add, though, that absolutely wasn't everyone,
Speaker 4: and there were some Iranians who followed the Ayatolla's commands
Speaker 4: to pray for the president, and so we saw people
Speaker 4: gathering at mosques there to carry out that prayer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you have a very complex global and domestic situation.
Speaker 1: That domestic situation is really interesting. There's also a whole
Speaker 1: nother economic angle to all of this. I mean, Iran
Speaker 1: has been the center of sanctions for a while now
Speaker 1: from a lot of the countries in the West, and
Speaker 1: those countries will be looking to see what the succession
Speaker 1: of power looks like in reevaluating that relationship or keeping
Speaker 1: it the same. What we do know is that we
Speaker 1: still have a lot of questions around what happens next
Speaker 1: and what exactly has happened here. Will bring everybody an
Speaker 1: update on this story when we learn a little bit more.
Speaker 1: For now, though, that gives us a sense of where
Speaker 1: things stand. Thanks so much for joining us on the
Speaker 1: Daily os this morning. If you're listening to this podcast
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Speaker 1: Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Calkatin woman
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