Life after the Butcher of Tehran's death will be dangerous for the entire world, writes MARK ALMOND. Ebrahim Raisi executed thousands, boosted Hamas and courted Putin. His successor could be worse...

Winston Churchill once described Russia as 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. The same could be said of Iran today and now, with the death of its president, killed in a helicopter smash on Sunday, Tehran's aims and ambitions have grown yet more impenetrable.

DForeign leaders, including China's Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and other anti-Western despots, have expressed their sorrow at the death of Ebrahim Raisi. So have democratically-elected leaders such as India's Narendra Modi and even one or two top officials from the European Union.

Back in Iran, however, the five days of official mourning have been disrupted by celebratory fireworks and the sound of car horns honking. To many Iranians, particularly the young, Raisi was a bloodthirsty oppressor they knew as the 'Butcher of Tehran'.

On his journey from youthful participant in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 – which toppled the corrupt and repressive regime of the Shah – to his final destination as president of the republic itself, 63-year-old Raisi had followed a tragically common path: from idealistic teenage revolutionary to hanging judge before the age of 30.

Just as the French Revolution of 1789 swiftly gave way to the tyranny of Robespierre and the Russian Revolution spawned the those twin despots Lenin and Stalin, so the unity of those who overthrew the Shah soon splintered and gave way to infighting, purges and a new, even more vicious form of autocracy.

Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter smash on Sunday. To many Iranians, particularly the young, Raisi was a bloodthirsty oppressor they knew as the 'Butcher of Tehran'

Rescue workers at the scene of the helicopter crash in a foggy, mountainous region of Iran

And Raisi distinguished himself as a notably cruel enforcer for Iran's dogmatic new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Those who had once opposed the Shah's regime because they were democrats or socialists – rather than Islamists – were declared 'enemies of God' and persecuted terribly.

As a judge, Raisi specialised in handing out death sentences after five-minute trials. In one particularly brutal purge, he condemned as many as 5,000 people in just a few weeks, often supervising the executions himself.

Victims were hanged in public, their own children sometimes forced to watch.

Career success did not moderate his outlook. Raisi's elevation to president of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2021 was a sign that his patron, the new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei (successor to Khomeini) wanted to crack down on dissent at home and assert Iran's influence abroad.

Rigid enforcement of clothing rules for women was one signal that the ruling zealots would not bend or moderate their views, whatever the domestic pressure from a discontented population.

And when it came to foreign affairs, it was Raisi who ramped up Iran's support for radical Islamist groups such as Hamas In Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, in a bid to disrupt a united, American-led West.

Raisi also courted Putin's Russia, supplying it with its cheap - but devastatingly effective - Shahed drones to attack Ukraine.

The mountainous region where the helicopter crashed. Raisi, Iran's foreign minister and several other officials were found dead 

The ill-fated helicopter carrying the Iranian president was pictured as it took off

China also became an ally, agreeing to buy much of Iran's oil as a way of avoiding US-led Western sanctions.

Needless to say, such antagonism of the West and Israel has been fuelling conspiracy theories about the way he met his end.

In reality, it is near certain that the accident was caused by pilot error in dangerous foggy conditions in the north-western mountains of Iran.

But suspicion that Israeli agents in some way sabotaged Raisi's helicopter – as they have sabotaged Iran's nuclear facilities and assassinated a number of its atomic scientists – is rife.

Such speculation suits Tehran and helps divert attention away from a rising tide of political problems on the home front.

But Raisi's sudden death poses a double succession problem for the Islamic Republic.

Iran must not only find a new president but address the ever more urgent question of who will succeed the true power in the land, the ailing 85-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Rescue teams scramble over the mountains to find the crashed helicopter and those on board 

While the Iranian president is the day-to-day head of government, it is the Supreme Leader who has ultimate authority over the country's stance on every major issue.

Raisi might well have fancied himself in the role but now that he is out of the picture we can expect heated, possibly bloody, infighting among Iran's revolutionary elite.

The voters will have little or no choice, of course, but then democracy such as it is in Iran has fallen into disrepute, turnout at elections has fallen to embarrassingly low levels.

As support for the regime declines, Iran's Revolutionary Guards in concert with the 'Basij' – thugs who work as a kind of local riot police – have been ever more visible, instilling fear and quelling dissent.

The Revolutionary Guards are the regime's most powerful enforcers. Like the Praetorian Guards of the Roman emperors 2,000 years ago, they protect the state and its leaders against threats both at home or abroad and it is they who will probably decide who will end up as president and supreme leader.

If these elite soldiers openly decide who runs the Islamic Republic, then any pretence that Iran is a democracy will disappear. It will become a dictatorship whose political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong once put it.

And in that, there are huge dangers for the regime itself – as history tells us. The sources of discontent that disfigured and then destroyed the Shah's regime in the year before 1979 have reappeared in Iran.

Then, Iranians of all ages and both sexes were disgusted with the corruption of the Shah's cronies and the squandering of the country's natural oil wealth on prestige projects and huge military expenditure.

Today, the daughters of the Islamic elite have been seen partying in New York wearing clothes far more revealing than anything worn by girls at home. Pictures of them are circulating in Tehran at a time when ordinary Iranians find life ever harder under Western sanctions.

People also ask why Iran sends billions on terrorist groups abroad as its own citizens grow ever more impoverished.

But those rejoicing at the Butcher of Tehran's demise should be careful what they wish for. The Middle East's biggest and most ancient country sits at the heart of the world's most sensitive geopolitical region.

Will Iran's embattled mullahs respond to the crisis by doubling down – speeding up the race to acquire nuclear weapons, for example, or lashing out with further armed conflict in the region?

Yes, let's hope for an end of the Islamic Republic which Ebrahim Raisi served so cruelly for so long. But we must pray that it ends not with a bang but a whimper.