Image shows wrecked police plane in 2020, not crash that killed Iran's president | Fact check
The claim: Image shows wreckage from helicopter crash that killed Iranian president
A May 20 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows people searching through a wooded area near the wreckage of an aircraft that bears the flag of Iran.
“The Iranian ‘Mehr’ Agency: The Iranian President and the rest of the helicopter passengers died in the accident while performing work duty in East Azerbaijan Province, northwest of the country,” reads the post’s caption in Arabic, according to Google translate.
The post received more than 100 likes in less than a day. Similar versions of the claim were shared thousands of times on X, formerly Twitter.
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Our rating: False
The wreckage shown in the image is from a plane crash in 2020, not the 2024 helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
Image shows scene of 2020 Iran police plane crash
Raisi and other officials were killed May 19 when their helicopter crashed in the mountainous terrain of northern Iran amid heavy fog, according to officials and reports from state media.
But the image in the Instagram post does not show the scene of that crash. Instead, it shows the wreckage of an Iranian police plane that crashed more than four years earlier.
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The image was originally shared on X on April 22, 2020, by the Iranian humanitarian organization Red Crescent. It shows the site in Iran near Salman Shahr where a plane headed from Bisheh Kolah to Tehran crashed, killing the pilot and co-pilot, its caption states in Persian.
The helicopter that crashed while carrying Raisi was a Bell 212, according to news reports citing Iran state media. The aircraft shown in the Instagram post bears No. 1136. That number corresponds to the Cessna T206H Turbo Stationair II used by police in Iran before it crashed in 2020, according to multiple media reports at the time.
Paste BN reached out to the Instagram user who shared the post but did not immediately receive a response.
Our fact-check sources:
- Red Crescent Society of Iran, April 22, 2020, X post
- Airliners.net, April 11, 2014, Cessna T206H Turbo Stationair II - Iran - Police
- Mehr News Agency, April 22, 2020, Iran’s police ‘training’ plane crashes in Mazandaran prov.
- Transportation Industry News Network, April 23, 2020, Wreckage of crashed plane found in Mazandaran
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