Iranian authorities faced bitter recriminations yesterday over the deaths of around 110 people, many of them journalists, when a decrepit military plane ploughed into a densely-populated area of Tehran.
Several newspapers claimed the C-130 transport plane -- bought from the US before the Islamic revolution nearly three decades ago and starved of spare parts -- had been told to take off despite serious reservations.
Just minutes after leaving the runway, the plane suffered engine failure and crashed into the foot of a housing block in a densely populated area of the city. Official media have put the death toll at between 108 and 116, including all 94 passengers and crew.
PHOTO: EPA
"The plane should have taken off at seven in the morning. My husband called me from the plane at eight to say there were technical problems. I was very worried," said the wife of Mohammad Karbalai, a photographer killed in the crash.
"I called him back at 10 o'clock, and the plane was still on the ground. He said the pilot was refusing to take off because of technical problems," she told her late husband's newspaper, the conservative Hamshahri daily.
Among the dead passengers were 68 journalists who were being flown to the southeastern port city of Bandar Abbas and were then to travel to Charbahar further south to report on military exercises.
"It is a disaster for the journalistic community and the government is declaring a day of mourning for the media," Culture Minister Mohammad Hossein Safar-Harandi said, quoted by the official IRNA news agency.
Iran's air force is believed to have no more than around 15 of the US-made C-130s in operation. It bought the workhorses, also known as Hercules, before the 1979 Islamic revolution when Iran was ruled by the Washington-backed shah.
Since then, clerical-ruled Iran has been subject to tough US sanctions, hindering the purchase of critical spare parts for all US-made planes.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
RSS