Skip to main content

Iranian plane crash kills all 168 aboard

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

India's swine flu death rate is increasing

Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in...

Suicide bombings kill 18 in Iraq

Thursday, August 13, 2009 MOSUL: At least 18 people, most of them members of the ancient Yazidi religious sect, were killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up on Thursday in a packed cafe in northern Iraq, a local government official said.At least 31 people were also wounded after the bombers detonated suicide belts packed with explosives in the cafe in Kalaa town, in the district of Sanjar, local district chief Dakheel Qassem Hasoon, told a foreign news agency."Two suicide bombers entered the Cafe Barbaroz at 4:30 pm (1330 GMT) and blew themselves up, killing 18 civilians and wounding 31. Most of the victims were Yazidis," Hasoon said.Kalaa, northwest of the insurgent stronghold of Mosul in northern Nineveh province is predominantly populated by the minority Yazidi religious sect, as well as Arabs and Kurds.The attack is the deadliest since Monday, when 51 people were killed across Iraq, including 28 members of the tiny Shabak sect cut down when two truck bombs det...

US drones to target Taliban in Afghan war

Friday, July 31, 2009 WASHINGTON: The US military plans to use more drone aircraft to target Taliban militants in Afghanistan while focusing less on hunting down Al-Qaeda figures, report said on Thursday.Although defeating the Al-Qaeda terror network remains an overriding goal for Washington, officials now believe the best way to pursue that objective is to ensure stability in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan instead of Al-Qaeda manhunts, the paper said, citing US government and Defense Department officials.It was more important to prevent a slide towards violence and anarchy that could be exploited by Al-Qaeda, which used Afghanistan to stage its attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the officials said."We might still be too focused on Bin Laden," an official said. "We should probably reassess our priorities."The shift in priorities for the drone fleet comes despite President Barack Obama's declaration that defeating and dismantling Al-Qaeda ...