Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was seen on Monday attending a funeral procession for slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, according to videos circulating on social media.
This marks the first public appearance in months for the former President.
In May, The New York Times reported on a joint secret operation by Israel and the United States which aimed to install Ahmadinejad as the leader of a new government in Tehran after the elimination of Khamenei.
According to American officials, an Israeli Air Force strike targeted Ahmadinejad's heavily guarded eastern Tehran residence. The tactical objective was to neutralize the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps guards holding him under house arrest, effectively executing a high-stakes jailbreak.
While the strike successfully decimated the security outpost at the entrance of the street, Ahmadinejad was injured in the blast. He was originally reported to have been killed but survived the close call, and associates quoted in The Times reported that the near-miss left him completely disillusioned with the regime-change plot.
The choice of Ahmadinejad as a potential partner for Western alignment has baffled intelligence analysts. During his tenure as president from 2005 to 2013, he was a notorious fundamentalist who aggressively accelerated Iran's uranium enrichment program, violently suppressed domestic protests, and infamously and repeatedly called to wipe Israel off the map and also denied the Holocaust.
Before leaving office in 2013, Ahmadinejad said that denying the Holocaust was his “proudest moment" as President.
In 2019, the former President insisted that he is not an antisemite and is merely opposed to the “Zionist government".
In the years leading up to the war, Ahmadinejad had increasingly clashed with Khamenei. He was barred from running in multiple presidential elections and confined to his home in the Narmak district after publicly accusing senior regime officials of systemic corruption.