Burlington Free Press
July 15, 2009
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TEHRAN, Iran – An Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed
a quarter-hour after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field
northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces. State television
said all on board were killed.
The impact gouged a deep trench in the dirt field, which was shown
littered with smoking wreckage in footage shown on state TV. It showed
a large chunk of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in
small pieces, and emergency workers and witnesses picked around the
shredded metal for bodies.
The Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet was heading from Tehran to the
Armenian capital Yerevan near the village of Jannatabad outside the
city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, state television
said. It crashed at about 11:30 am, 16 minutes after taking off from
Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, TV reported.
The Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the
IRNA news agency that the plane was completely destroyed and shattered
to pieces, and the wreckage was in flames. "It his highly likely that
all the passengers on the flight were killed," Bahzadpour said.
Iranian Civil Aviation Organization spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told
state television that 153 passengers and 15 crewmembers were on
board. State TV said all were killed.
A Caspian Airlines representative told AP in Yerevan that most of the
passengers were Armenians, and that some Georgian citizens were also
on board. The representative spoke on condition of anonymity because
she was not authorized to talk to the press.
Also among the passengers were eight members of Iran’s national youth
judo team, along with two trainers and a delegation chief, who were
scheduled to train with the Armenian judo team before attending
competitions in Hungary on Aug. 6, state TV said.
Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in
1993. Iran has frequent plane crashes often because of bad maintenance
of its aging aircraft. Tehran blames the problem in part on
U.S. sanctions that prevent Iran from getting spare parts for some
planes. Caspian Airlines, however, uses Russian-made Tupolevs whose
maintenance would be less impaired 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 U.S.-made C-130 plane, crashed into a
10-story building near Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. In Nov. 2007, a
Russian-made Iranian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff
killing 36 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
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AP writer Avet Demourian in Yerevan, Armenia, contributed to this report.