Dubai (AP): Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the country's foreign minister and others have been found dead at the site of a helicopter crash Monday after an hourslong search through a foggy, mountainous region of the country's northwest, state media reported. Raisi was 63.

The crash comes as the Middle East remains unsettled by the Israel-Hamas war, during which Raisi under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel just last month.

State TV gave no immediate cause for the crash in Iran's East Azerbaijan province. Among the dead was Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, 60.

With Raisi were Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian, the governor of Iran's East Azerbaijan province and other officials and bodyguards, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

Early Monday morning, Turkish authorities released what they described as drone footage showing what appeared to be a fire in the wilderness that they “suspected to be wreckage of helicopter.”

The coordinates listed in the footage put the fire some 20 kilometres south of the Azerbaijan-Iranian border on the side of a steep mountain.

Footage released by the IRNA early Monday showed what the agency described as the crash site, across a steep valley in a green mountain range. Soldiers speaking in the local Azeri language said: “There it is, we found it.”

 

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Thane (PTI): Two minor girls were rescued after a prostitution racket was busted in Navi Mumbai, a police official said on Monday.

On a tip off about one Harish running a flesh trade racket, the Navi Mumbai Crime Branch started a probe on February 20, the official said.

"A decoy customer was sent to verify the information, following which a trap was laid in front of a hotel in Sector 11. The Anti Human Trafficking Cell nabbed Harish Vikas Chhari, a resident of Koparkhairane, while his associate Raj Singh is on the run. Two minor girls were rescued," the CBD Belapur police station official said.

A case has been registered under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, the official added.