Russian plane found to have flown to Iranian border on day of alleged Khamenei evacuation

A plane belonging to Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry flew from an airbase on the Iran-Azerbaijan border to the Russian capital on Thursday, the day on which Iran’s new supreme leader was supposedly evacuated to Moscow for medical treatment, flight tracking data accessed by Novaya Gazeta Europe has confirmed.

The detail comes after an unconfirmed report by the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida, which, citing a “high-ranking source”, claimed on Sunday that Vladimir Putin arranged for Mojtaba Khamenei to be flown out of Iran on Thursday to receive medical treatment in Moscow after he sustained serious injuries in the Israeli airstrike that killed his father and former Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Information available on tracking website Flightradar24 shows that a Russian government plane flew from Moscow to the Azerbaijani city of Lankaran, 40km from the Iranian border, on Thursday before returning to Moscow that evening. According to local reports, the plane was officially transporting 13 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Iran, which was picked up by vans sent by the Iranian Red Crescent.

During the flight from Moscow to Lankaran, the plane followed a relatively normal flight path, with some small anomalies near Moscow likely due to anti-drone measures in the capital. However, on its return to Russia, the aircraft made erratic jumps in its position, indicating either that the transponder was transmitting spoofed location data, or that the aircraft was targeted by severe GPS jamming.

The plane in question is an aging Soviet-era Ilyushin Il-76 that was recently used to evacuate Russians stranded in Israel, Lebanon and Iran following the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East earlier this month. According to the website of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, aircraft of this type can accommodate up to five medical modules, each capable of transporting four injured patients.

Initial American claims that Mojtaba Khamenei had been “disfigured” in the Israeli attack on the Khamenei compound in Tehran were first substantiated on Wednesday by Iran’s own ambassador to Cyprus, Alireza Salarian, who said in an interview that the younger Khamenei had been “lucky to survive the strike”. The new ayatollah reportedly sustained severe injuries to his leg, arm and hand.