The Armenian government on Monday did not deny or confirm reports that Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi cancelled at the last minute a visit to Armenia scheduled for Sunday, the day that he died in a helicopter crash.
“Information is officially given about confirmed visits of high-ranking officials to Armenia,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ani Badalyan said in a short statement to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. She did not comment further.
Citing an unnamed “source,” Russia’s leading state news agency, TASS, reported that Raisi had been due to attend a ceremony to launch a road project in Armenia. “The visit was postponed at the last moment,” it said.
Raisi traveled on Sunday to the Azerbaijani-Iranian border where he inaugurated with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev a dam on the Arax river separating the two countries. He was returning from that ceremony when a helicopter carrying him, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other officials crashed in a mountainous forest in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province.
Read also
Alphanews.am quoted a spokeswoman for the Armenian Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructures as saying that a joint Armenian-Iranian “event” was due to take place last week on a road leading from the Iranian border to Kajaran, a town in Armenia’s Syunik province. She did not say why it was cancelled.
Last October, the Armenian government awarded a $215 million contact to a consortium of two Iranian companies to upgrade the 32-kilometer road over the next three years. The contract was signed in Yerevan in the presence of Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Mehrzad Bazrpash. The latter thus underscored its geopolitical significance for Tehran.
Azerbaijan’s September 2023 takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh raised more fears in Yerevan that Baku will also attack Armenia to open an exterritorial land corridor to the Nakhichevan exclave through Syunik. Iran has repeatedly warned against attempts to strip it of the common border and transport links with Armenia. Raisi reportedly told a visiting Azerbaijani official in October that the corridor sought by Baku is “resolutely opposed” by his country.