Ebrahim Raisi, whose helicopter crashed in the northwest of Iran on Sunday, was both the President of Iran and a candidate jockeying to succeed the elderly actual ruler of the country, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Both political positions carried an elevated risk level roughly comparable with that of traveling by air inside Iran—where aviation safety, compromised by decades of sanctions and uneven maintenance, has claimed the lives of almost as many senior Iranian officials as its shadow war with Israel, which also loomed over Raisi’s reported demise. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The cause of the crash—which also killed Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, and others—is pending investigation.