AN IRANIAN airliner en route to neighbouring Armenia caught fire mid-air and crashed in farmland yesterday, killing all 168 people on board.
Witnesses and state media said the Caspian Airlines Tupolev TU-154M was ablaze before plunging to the ground and exploding near a village northeast of Tehran.
A relief worker said all he had found at the crash site — a crater — were “pieces of flesh and bones”.
“There is not a single piece which can be identified. There is not a single finger of anybody left,” he said.
Mohammad Reza Montazer Khorasan, the head of disaster management at Iran’s health ministry, said all aboard Flight 7908 — 153 passengers and 15 crew — were dead.
The 22-year-old Russian-built aircraft crashed near a village outside the city of Qazvin at 11.49am (5.19pm AEST) 16 minutes after take-off from Tehran’s international airport.
The passengers on Flight 7908 bound for the Armenian capital of Yerevan included 10 members of Iran’s junior national judo team.
“I saw the plane when it was just … above the ground. Its wheels were out and there was fire blazing from the lower parts,” a witness told the Fars news agency.
“It seemed the pilot was trying to land and moments later the plane hit the ground and broke into pieces.”
Iran’s English-language Press TV quoted a witness from the site near the village of Janat Abad — about 130km northeast of Tehran — as saying: “The aircraft all of a sudden fell out of the sky and exploded on impact.”
In Yerevan, the deputy head of the Armenian civil aviation organisation, Arsen Pogossian, said the pilot had attempted an emergency landing after an engine caught fire.
“A fire broke out in one engine, and the pilot attempted an emergency landing,” Mr Pogossian said.
Iran, which has been under years of international sanctions, has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade but last night’s crash is the worst for many years.
Iranian state television’s website quoted Ahmad Momeni, managing director of Iran’s airport authority, as saying the last conversation between the pilot and the ground was “normal and did not indicate any technical glitch”.
At Yerevan’s airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and her nephews, aged six and 11. “What will I do without them?” she said, weeping, before she collapsed to the floor.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered the Transport Ministry to launch a probe into the disaster, the latest major air crash in six weeks.
Two weeks ago, a Yemeni Airbus crashed in the Indian Ocean off the Comoros islands, killing 152 people, while on June 1 an Air France Airbus plunged into the Atlantic coast off Brazil, killing 228.
In December 2005, a total of 108 people were killed when a Lockheed transport plane crashed into a high-rise housing block outside Tehran.
Iran’s civil and military fleet is made up of ancient aircraft in poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance.
The Iranian regime is barred by sanctions from buying US Boeing planes or European Airbus aircraft when they include a significant number of US parts.
Caspian Airlines was established in 1992. Its website says it operates more than 50 regular flights, and numerous charter flights each week between Iranian cities and international flights to Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus and Turkey.
AFP, AP
