People attend a funeral ceremony for the late Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi and seven members of his entourage in the northwestern city of Tabriz on 21 May 2024. (ATA DADASHI/MOJ News Agency/AFP)
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, whose death in a helicopter crash was announced Monday, is the latest major political leader to die in an aviation crash. Here are other leaders killed in aviation crashes.
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On 10 April 2010, a Tupolev 154 with 96 people aboard including Polish President Lech Kaczynski and senior political and military figures, crashed while trying to land in thick fog at an airport near Smolensk in western Russia.
There were no survivors. The crash was attributed to bad weather as well as errors by the Polish pilots and Russian air traffic controllers.
On 30 July 2005, John Garang, the former separatist rebel leader who became vice-president of Sudan, died when his helicopter crashed in Sudan on a flight back from Uganda.
Macedonia’s president Boris Trajkovski was killed along with eight others when his plane crashed on 26 February 2004, as it prepared to land in thick fog in the southern Bosnian town of Mostar.
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On 6 April 1994, a Falcon 50 transporting Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over Kigali by at least one missile.
The attack is considered the spark that unleashed the genocide of Tutsis that left at least 800 000 dead, according to the United Nations.
Pakistan’s president Zia ul-Haq was among the victims of a 17 August 1988 plane crash near Bahawalpur, in the country’s east.
On 19 October 1986, Mozambique’s first president Samora Machel died when his Tupolev 134 went down in the north-east of South Africa.
In September 1961, a plane carrying the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold crashed in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, while attempting to negotiate a ceasefire between warring factions in the former Belgian Congo. The cause of the crash has never been established.
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