Plane Crashes in Iran; 168 Feared Dead

A Iranian passenger jet crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran Wednesday, and all 168 people aboard were believed dead.

The Caspian Airlines Tupolev jet went down about 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport, civil aviation officials said.

Its tail burst into flames in the air, and the plane circled as if looking for a placed to land before crashing and shattering into pieces in a field near the city of Qazvin, about 90 miles northwest of the capital, witnesses said.

Officials said the doomed jet, Flight No. 7908, was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members. It was headed to Yerevan, Armenia.

"It his highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed," Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the IRNA news agency.

He said the plane was destroyed.

The impact gouged a deep crater in a dirt field, which was shown on state television littered with smoking pieces of the plane and tattered passports.

Emergency workers and witnesses combed through the shredded metal for bodies and the flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.

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.

Most of those on board the Tu-154M were Armenians, along with some Georgian citizens, a Caspian Airlines representative said. The Russian news agency said Russian citizens also were on board.

At Yerevan airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and the sister's 6- and 11-year-old sons, who were believed to be on the flight. "What will I do without them?" she said, before she collapsing to the floor, weeping.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences for the deaths and urging a swift investigation.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but crashes due to poor maintenance are common in Iran, experts said.

Tehran blames the maintenance woes of its airlines in part on U.S. 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, experts said.

Aviation analyst Kieran Daly told CNN many aircraft operating in Iran are Tupolevs, some dating back to the 1970s. He described Tupolevs as "workhorses of the old Soviet aviation system."

More coverage from the New York Daily News.