NEARLY 170 KILLED IN IRAN PLANE CRASH(AGENCIES)
China Daily
July 15 2009
TEHRAN: An Iranian passenger plane carrying nearly 170 people crashed
shortly after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of
the capital and shattering to pieces. State television said all on
board were killed.
The plane’s tail burst into flames in the air and the aircraft circled
as if looking for a place to land before it crashed, an unidentified
witness told the semi-official ISNA news agency.
The impact gouged a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered
with smoking wreckage and body parts, according to photos from the
scene. Footage aired on state TV showed a large chunk of a wing, but
much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds, and emergency
workers and witnesses picked around the shredded metal for bodies
and flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.
The Caspian Airlines Tupolev jet had taken off from Tehran’s Imam
Khomeini International Airport Wednesday and was headed to the Armenian
capital Yerevan. It crashed about 16 minutes after takeoff near the
village of Jannat Abad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles
northwest of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jaafarzadeh told
state media.
Map locating Qazvin in northwestern Iran, where a Caspian
Airlines aircraft with up to 169 people on board crashed on
Wednesday. [Agencies]
At Yerevan’s airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting
for her sister and the sister’s 6- 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, but Iran has
frequent crashes that are blamed on poor maintenance of its aging
fleet. Hossein Ayaznia, an aviation police official, said emergency
workers were searching for the plane’s black box.
The deputy chairman of Armenia’s civil aviation authority Arsen
Pogosian told reporters in Yerevan there were 154 passengers and
15 crewmembers on board the TU-154M. Earlier, Jaafarzadeh had put
the number at 153 passengers and 15 crew, and the reason for the
discrepancy was not immediately known.
Six Armenian citizens and two Georgian citizens were on the flight,
and the rest were likely Iranians, Pogosian 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.
Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the IRNA
news agency that the plane was completely destroyed and shattered the
pieces. "It is highly likely that all the passengers on the flight
were killed," he said.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences
for the deaths and urging a swift investigation of the cause.
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.
Tehran blames the maintenance woes of its airlines in part on
US sanctions that prevent Iran from getting spare parts for some
planes. However, Caspian Airlines — an Iranian-Russian joint venture
founded in 1993 — 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 US-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.