128 killed as plane hits apartments

AT LEAST 128 people were killed when a military transport plane clipped the top of a 10-storey apartment building in Tehran and crashed, gouging out a huge crater and igniting a major fire.

All 94 people on the plane were killed, most of them Iranian radio and television journalists heading to cover military manoeuvres in the south. Thirty-four residents of the apartment building also died, and 90 were injured, Tehran state radio said.

Flames leapt out of windows, and from the roof and several other floors of the building as panicked residents fled the Towhid complex, a series of high-rise apartment buildings for air force personnel in the Azadi suburb of Tehran.

Most of the plane landed at the base of the building, scattering wreckage over a wide area, smashing parked cars and damaging support columns on the structure.

Witness Mohammad Khatibi said the fuselage of the aircraft fell nearly straight down after the wing hit the top of the structure.

Firefighters managed to put out the fire, and police cordoned off the building and debris field, preventing journalists and a crowd of as many as 10,000 people from getting close to the site.

Many in the crowd were screaming, afraid their relatives had been killed. Several hours after the crash, the building still was smouldering, with black smoke hanging in the air.

“It was like an earthquake,” said Reza Sadeqi, a 25-year-old merchant, who saw the plane hit the building.

“The force of the crash threw me about nine feet inside my shop.”

“I felt the heat of the fire caused by the crash. It was like being in hell,” he said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was visiting Saudi Arabia, sent condolences.

“Rescue teams are required to employ their maximum capability to save and help the survivors,” TV quoted Mr Ahmadinejad as saying. He asked one of his deputies to take charge and assure survivors receive all the help necessary.

The C-130 aircraft had just taken off from the nearby Mehrabad airport en route to Bandar Abbas, a port city in southern Iran, when it developed engine trouble and was returning to the airport for an emergency landing. It lost altitude because of the engine failure and the pilot was unable to maintain altitude to miss the apartment compound, state-run television said.

The television report did not say if there were multiple engine failures. The C-130 is built by Lockheed and has four turbo-prop engines. The transport aircraft were first produced in the 1960s and the one that crashed may have been sold to the Iranian air force when the US had close relations with the Iranian monarch, Shah Reza Pahlavi, before the Islamic revolution in 1979.