President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and several others are confirmed to have been

killed in Sunday’s helicopter crash in north-western Iran, state TV says.

The accidental death of the President of Iran and of much of his cabinet is not a cause for celebration. At a humanitarian level , his family will mourn as any family will. At a political level, his death leaves his country , already inflamed, in an even more dangerous state.

It is being commented on that the cause of death may be a malfunction of an aged helicopter that was not fit for flight but was made do for lack of a better. This tells me that if even the President cannot be protected , the rest of the country must be in a pretty bad state. I don’t know many Iranians, but I suspect their country is in a bad state – mainly due to economic sanctions. So sanctions may be blamed by a country that’s sick of them, for their President’s death. That doesn’t bode well for world peace.

At the Pension PlayPen we pray for peace in the East of Europe and now in the Middle East, not for economic advantage but for the sake of those who suffer from war. It is generally not the presidents and the generals who pay the price of war , but civilians. The deaths of the President of Iran and his cabinet appear to be Civilian deaths , caused by faulty equipment that almost certainly would not have been in use in a less deprived country.

I know there will be many reading this who will be secretly glad that a man has died whose views are antithetical to theirs (and mine). But it is no better to wish him dead than to wish our own leaders dead. Peace in the East did not take a step forward for a helicopter crashing into a mountain.