Iran plane fire kills 29

An Iranian passenger plane skidded off the runway, sparking a fire as it landed in the north-eastern city of Mashhad today, killing 29 people, Iran’s aviation chief said.

His comments corrected an earlier report of 80 dead, which had come from state-run television.

The plane, carrying 148 people, slid off the runway, “then its left wing hit the ground and caught fire”, Nourollah Rezai Niaraki, chairman of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organisation, said in a TV interview.

Mr Niaraki said it was not immediately known why the plane skidded off the runway. Earlier, the television said a tyre on the aircraft exploded while landing, but that could not be confirmed.

Rescue workers carried survivors on stretchers out of the gutted craft, which lay in a pool of water near the runway.

In footage shown on the Iranian television, the middle section of the plane was charred and the roof collapsed, while firefighters sprayed the engines with water.

The flight – by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated to Iran’s national air carrier – originated in Bandar Abbas, in the south of the country. The television said none of the flight’s crew were among the dead.

The craft was a Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154, the same make as a passenger jet owned by Russia’s Pulkovo Airlines that crashed in Ukraine on August 22 while en route from a Russian resort to St. Petersburg, killing all 170 people on board.

In 2002, a Russian-made Tupolev-154 crashed in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 119 people on board.

Mashhad, located 1,000km northeast of Tehran, is visited by some 12 million people annually on pilgrimage to its Shiite Islamic shrines. It was not clear, however, if the passengers in today’s flight included pilgrims.

Iran has frequent plane accidents and has several times blamed them on US sanctions that it says make it difficult to import spare parts, even from Europe. However, it does not have similar difficulty buying parts for its Russian planes, some of whose recent crashes have been blamed on poor maintenance and other problems.

The West offered to open the door to sales of new planes and spare parts in an incentive package aimed at getting it to roll back its nuclear programme.

Six people died in a cargo helicopter crash in August just north of the capital, Tehran.

In March, Iran Air expressed interest in purchasing US aircraft although it wasn’t clear how it would circumvent US sanctions in place since 1979 when diplomatic relations were cut after militants stormed the US embassy and held hostages for more than a year.