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Ebrahim Raisi, a protege of the country;s supreme leader who helped oversee mass executions of thousands in 1988 & helped enrich uranium nuclear weapons-grade levels that orchestrated major attacks on Israel, died at 63.
The helicopter that crashed in Iran was a Bell 212, a twin-engine civilian version of the venerable "Huey" UH-1 that became ubiquitous during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and '70s.
The Aviation Safety Network, which maintains a database of accidents for various aircraft, shows that the Bell 212 and its military equivalents have experienced about 30 accidents since 2017, eight of them causing fatalities.
The Bell 212 in Iran was probably one bought in the 1970s while the Shah was still in power, prior to the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution, according to The National, the state-run English-language daily in the United Arab Emirates.
U.S. sanctions have made spare parts hard to obtain
According to the same paper, after the Shah was overthrown, Iran continued to use many U.S.-made aircraft "but faced difficulty obtaining spare parts due to American sanctions."
