Iranian Plane Crash Kills All 168 Aboard
By VOA News
15 July 2009

Photo released by semi-official Iranian Students News Agency shows
scene of plane crash about 75 miles northwest of Tehran, 15 Jul 2009
Iranian state media say a passenger plane has crashed in northwestern
Iran, killing all 168 people on board.

State television said Wednesday the Iranian airliner was heading to
the Armenian capital of Yerevan when it went down near the northern
Iranian city of Qazvin. The plane crashed 16 minutes after taking off
from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Reports quote some witnesses as saying the plane was on fire in
mid-air.

State television quotes an unidentified witness as saying the plane
suddenly fell from the sky and exploded on impact, causing a huge
crater. However, the managing director of Iran’s airport authority
said there were no indications of problems in conversations between
the pilot and ground controllers before the crash.

Video footage showed a field littered with small pieces of smoking
wreckage from the Caspian Airlines plane. Investigators are searching
for the plane’s black box (instrument recording device).

Officials said the aircraft was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew
members.

The passengers included Armenians, Georgians and Iranians. Iran says
10 members of its junior judo squad were among those killed.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has expressed his condolences to
the victims’ families. Some of those families have gathered at
Yerevan’s airport.

The Armenian government says President Serzh Sargsyan is cutting short
a working trip to return to Yerevan.

Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture that was founded
in the early 1990s.

Iran has frequent plane crashes, often due to poor maintenance of
aging planes.

In the past, Tehran has blamed its plane problems, in part, on
U.S. sanctions that it says prevent Iran from getting spare parts.
But Caspian airliners are Russian-made planes, so U.S. sanctions would
not have the same effect on aircraft maintenance. Some information
for this report was provided by AFP and AP.