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WORLD: Iranian plane crashes just after take-off, killing 168
Ed Harris15.07.09
A passenger plane crashed in Iran today, killing all 168 people on board.
Iranian state TV showed the point of impact: a deep trench into a field, with smoking wreckage scattered over a wide area. It also showed a large piece of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small pieces.
The Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet was flying to the Armenian capital Yerevan when it crashed 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport.
The crash site is near Jannatabad village, outside the city of Qazvin, about 75 miles north-west of Tehran. The Qazvin emergency services director, Hossein Bahzadpour, said the plane was destroyed and the wreckage was in flames. “It is highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed,” Mr Bahzadpour added.
Iranian Civil Aviation Organisation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told state television that 153 passengers and 15 crew were on board.
A Caspian Airlines representative in Yerevan said most of the passengers were Armenians, and that some Georgian citizens were also on board. Also among the passengers were eight members of Iran's national youth judo team, with two trainers and a delegation chief, who were due to train with the Armenian judo team.
Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993. Iran has frequent plane crashes, often blamed on bad maintenance of its ageing aircraft. Tehran says US sanctions prevent it from getting spare parts, but Caspian Airlines uses Russian-made Tupolevs whose maintenance would be hit less hard by American sanctions.
In February 2006, a Russian-made TU-154 operated by Iran Airtours crashed on landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtours Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.
Debris from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board, on 1 June as it flew from Rio de Janiero to Paris, has been taken to France for further examination.
A total of 640 parts were recovered from the sea and will be sent to a military research centre in Toulouse.
