OPINION

It's somewhat ironic that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the "Butcher of Tehran," met his end in an American helicopter.

When the U.S.-made Bell 212 helicopter plummeted into a mountainside in Northern Iran on May 19, it ended the life of one of the greatest criminals in Iranian — and for that matter, world — history.

Raisi was killed alongside Iran's foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian; Malek Rahmati, the governor of East Azerbaijan Province; and several others.

For Raisi, it was a fittingly fiery end to a murderous career.

I have been a key supporter of the main democratic Iranian opposition movement and a target for the mullahs' regime for more than 20 years.

The mullahs sent a registered diplomat — Assadollah Assadi — with instructions to detonate a half-kilo bomb at a major opposition rally I attended in Paris in June 2018.

Fortunately, Assadi and three co-conspirators were arrested and sentenced to decades of imprisonment as terrorists.

Assadi was then disgracefully sent back to a hero's welcome in Tehran in an outrageous prisoner-swap deal, in exchange for a young Belgian charity worker taken hostage by the mullahs.

Having failed to blow me up in Paris, Raisi's regime then listed as terrorists the leaders of In Search of Justice (ISJ), a Brussels-based nongovernmental organization that fights for the freedom of the Iranian people.

The ISJ leadership comprises Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a former senior vice president of the European Parliament, and Paulo Casaca and me, both former members of the European Parliament and longtime supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

On Nov. 9, a hit man attempted to assassinate Vidal-Quadras as he strolled outside his home in Madrid. He was shot in the face but miraculously survived.

All the signs are that the attempted killing was ordered by the mullahs, undoubtedly with the full cognizance of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Raisi.

Poorly educated, Raisi had neither academic nor religious standing. Aged 63, he was a callous thug and mass murderer turned religious fanatic.

Entering the main seminary in the holy city of Qom at 15 years of age, he joined the clerical regime's judiciary as assistant prosecutor in Karaj (west of Tehran) when he was only 19 years old.

He never studied law, but his loyalty and ruthless enthusiasm for crushing opponents of the fundamentalist regime was his ticket to fame and fortune. He became the prosecutor of the revolutionary court of Karaj when he was just 20.

Raisi's nickname as "The Butcher of Tehran" was well earned. As deputy prosecutor in Tehran in 1988, he was he was one of four individuals whom the then-supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, appointed to a "death commission" to carry out his infamous fatwa to massacre supporters of the opposition People's Mojahedin of Iran/Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK).

During that massacre, 30,000 political prisoners were summarily executed within a few months. For his zeal as a merciless executioner, he was promoted to the position of Tehran prosecutor in 1989 and held that position for five years.

In 2012, he became deputy head of the judiciary and then judiciary chief in March 2019, paving his pathway to the presidency as the ultimate, bloodstained hard-liner.

Following the alleged killing in custody by the so-called morality police of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in 2022, the event that triggered the mass protests, Raisi ordered the morality police to double down on their patrols and arrests.

The Guidance Patrol or "morality police" tour the streets of Iran's towns and cities in distinctive green and white vans, with teams of black-chador-clad women who pounce on any girl or woman showing hair beneath her veil or hijab.

Under Raisi's instructions, Guidance Patrol numbers have increased dramatically since the nationwide uprising.

Raisi was placed on the U.S. Treasury blacklist on Nov. 10, 2019, for serial human rights violations. Since then, as president, he directed the execution of over 2,000 people, many of them young protesters detained during the nationwide uprising in 2022 and 2023.

Last year alone, Raisi presided over the hanging of 864 men and women, a 48% increase from 2022.

Raisi's death has plunged the Iranian regime into an unprecedented crisis.

Eighty-five million Iranians are sick of the theocratic regime, sick of its corruption and incompetence, and sick of its squandering the nation's wealth on foreign proxy wars and terrorism, turning Iran into an international pariah.

Factional feuding among the ruling elite, as the mullahs struggle to cling on to power, has brought Iran to its knees.

The Iranian economy has collapsed.

Now there will have to be another presidential election. Following the first round of sham "elections" to the Majlis (Parliament) in Iran in March and the second round in May, when less than 7% of the voting population took part, it is clear that the vast majority of Iranians have no appetite for fake polls and stuffed ballot boxes, where the candidates have been carefully vetted and hand-picked by the supreme leader.

There will be yet another derisory turnout for the "coronation" of Raisi's successor. What the people of Iran long for is the overthrow of this gangster regime.

The death of Raisi, who had been seen as the favorite to succeed the ailing 85-year-old supreme leader, has so destabilized the regime that the rebellious and oppressed young people may now seize the opportunity to take the matter into their own hands and overthrow the ruling mullahs.

It would be a delicious turn of fate if the death of Raisi, the hard-liner catapulted into the presidency to crush public dissent, led to the revolution that rids the world of this corrupt and oppressive regime.

Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East.