Iran yesterday launched a probe into the crash of an Iran Air passenger jet, which killed 77 people and injured scores after the airliner broke into pieces in heavy snow and fog, state media said.
The Boeing 727 airliner with the state-run Iran Air crashed near the northwestern city of Orumiyeh at about 7:45pm on Sunday after it took off from Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport, state television said on its Web site.
“Unfortunately, 77 of our citizens were killed” in the accident, the state television said yesterday, out of the 105 people traveling on what reportedly was an ageing Boeing airliner delivered to Iran in 1974.
Television footage of the crash showed the airliner broken into three pieces and buried in thick snow. Some corpses were shown covered in blankets laying on snow near the plane’s debris.
“This flight had 105 persons on board, 94 passengers and 11 flight crew,” ISNA news agency reported quoting Ahmad Majidi, the head of the Iranian Ministry of Road and Transportation’s crisis panel.
Majidi, in a separate report on state news agency IRNA, said one passenger who was missing since the crash was found yesterday.
“He was thrown out of the plane. He has been taken to the hospital in Orumiyeh,” Majidi said, adding that another passenger was still untraceable.
Media reports said eight of the injured passengers were in critical condition, while the travelers included a Turk and two Iraqis.
Majidi said it appeared that bad weather led to the crash.
“Based on the evidence, the plane’s captain could not land at Orumiyeh Airport due to bad weather conditions and he decided to return [to Tehran], but for unknown reasons the plane crashed about 5 miles [8km] from the airport,” he said.
Iranian Minister of Road and Transportation Hamid Behbahani told Mehr news agency that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had ordered a probe into the crash, adding that the “preliminary reason is lack of visibility and fog” for the accident.
Iran Air spokesman Shahrokh Noushabadi had also blamed the bad weather for the crash.
The two black boxes of the Iran Air passenger jet had been recovered yesterday, Majidi said in a telephone interview from Tehran.
Meanwhile, ISNA reported that the crashed aircraft had been in service since 1974.
“The plane was given to Iran in 1974 and at that time it was a secondhand” aircraft, ISNA said, quoting what it identified as an unnamed informed source.
Iran’s civil and military fleet is made up of ancient aircraft in very poor condition because of their age and lack of maintenance.
Iran, which has been under years of international sanctions, has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade, several involving small companies using Russian crew or crews from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
In Iran’s worst air accident, a plane carrying members of the elite Revolutionary Guards crashed in February 2003, killing 302 people on board.
In July 2009, a Soviet-designed Tupolev caught fire in mid-air and plunged flaming into farmland northeast of Tehran, killing all 168 people on board.
In December 2005, a total of 108 people were killed when a Lockheed transport plane crashed into a high-rise housing block outside Tehran.
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