Iran plane crash kills all 168 people aboard

A RUSSIAN-MADE Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed shortly after take-off yesterday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering into flaming pieces. All on board were killed in Iran’s worst air disaster in six years, officials said.

Before crashing, the plane’s tail was on fire as it circled in the air, one witness said.

“Then, I saw the plane crashing nose-down. It hit the ground causing a big explosion. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Then, plane pieces were scattered all over the agricultural fields,” Ali Akbar Hashemi, a 23-year-old who was laying gas pipes in a nearby home, said.

The impact blasted a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered with smoking wreckage, body parts and personal items from the Tupolev jet, according to photos from the scene. Firefighters put out the flaming wreckage, which officials said was strewn over a 180m area. A large chunk of a wing was visible in footage of the scene, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds.

Iran has seen numerous crashes in recent years, usually blamed on poor maintenance. Iranian officials often blame US sanctions that prevent it from updating American aircraft bought before the 1979 Islamic revolution and make it difficult to get European spare parts or planes as well.

Iranian airlines and the military have turned increasingly to Russian aircraft, which are not affected by sanctions, but have seen a string of accidents. Two other Tupolev crashes in Iran this decade have killed nearly 140 people.

The Caspian Airlines Tu-154M jet had taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport yesterday morning and was headed to the Armenian capital Yerevan. It crashed at 11.30am about 16 minutes after take-off near the village of Jannat Abad outside the city of Qazvin, about 120km north-west of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh said.

At Yerevan’s airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and the sister’s six and 11-year-old sons, who were due on the flight. “What will I do without them?” she said, weeping, before she collapsed to the floor.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known. Hossein Ayaznia, an aviation police official, said emergency workers were searching for the plane’s data recorders to get evidence of the cause.

The deputy chairman of Armenia’s civil aviation authority Arsen Pogosian said there were 153 passengers and 15 crew members on board the plane.

“In all likelihood, all on board were killed,” Pogosian said.

Most of the passengers were Iranians, many of them from Iran’s large ethnic Armenian community, along with six Armenian citizens and two Georgian citizens, Pogosian said. The two Georgians included a staffer from the Caucasus nation’s embassy in Yerevan, Georgia’s military attache in the Armenian capital said.

Serob Karapetian, the chief of Yerevan Airport’s aviation security service, said the plane may have attempted an emergency landing, but reports that it caught fire in the air were “only one version”. He did not elaborate. A police official told Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency that several witnesses reported seeing the plane’s tail on fire in the air as it circled to find a place to land.

The plane was completely destroyed in the crash and shattered to pieces, Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Behzadpour said.

“The force of the crash was so serious that pieces of the aircraft were thrown over a 200m area. Unfortunately, all the bodies were totally destroyed,” he said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences for the deaths and urging a swift investigation of the cause.