Iran jet crash kills 168

An Iranian passenger plane crashed killing all 168 people on board today.

The Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet was flying from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan when it crashed near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles north-west of Tehran.

The Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour said the plane was completely destroyed and the wreckage was in flames. “It his highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed,” he said.

The Iranian Civil Aviation Organisation said 153 passengers and 15 crew were on board.

Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993. Iran has frequent plane crashes often because of bad maintenance of its ageing aircraft.

Tehran blames the problem in part on US sanctions that prevent it from getting sparse for some planes. Caspian Airlines, however, uses Russian-made Tupolevs whose maintenance would be less affected by American sanctions.

In February 2006, a Russian-made TU-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated with Iran’s national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.

The crashes have also affected Iran’s military. In December 2005, 115 people were killed when a US-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-storey building near Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. In November 2007, a Russian-made Iranian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff killing 36 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards.