caspian airlines

caspian airlines

BEIRUT, Lebanon — A passenger plane bound for Armenia from Iran crashed Wednesday morning in northwest Iran, and all 168 people aboard were believed to have perished, Iranian state media reported.

The plane, made by the Russian company Tupolev, crashed near the city of Qazvin at about 11:30 a.m. local time after leaving Tehran on a flight to Yerevan, the Armenian capital, Hussein Behzadpour, the police chief of Qazvin, said in comments quoted by Iran’s English language Press TV.

The crash site was near Jannatabad, a village just outside Qazvin, Mr. Behzadpour said.

The spokesman for Iran’s Aviation Organization, Reza Jafarzadeh, told Press TV that the plane, Caspian Airlines Flight 7908, crashed 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport. Qazvin is about 90 miles northwest of Tehran.

The plane was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members, state television reported. The broadcast showed wreckage mingled with human body parts, and a fire brigade official was quoted as saying the debris was strewn over a broad area.

Among the images was a crater gouged into farmland with mangled pieces of metal scattered about, Reuters reported.

News reports said the pilot may have been trying an emergency landing after technical problems occurred.

The Associated Press quoted a spokesman for the airline in Yerevan as saying that most of the passengers were Armenians but that some Georgians also were on board. Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993, The A.P. said.

Iran has been plagued by plane crashes in recent years, a record that aviation experts have attributed to the country’s aging and outdated planes, many of them secondhand aircraft leased from Russia.

In September 2006, a Russian-made Tupolev plane TU-154 apparently blew a tire while landing in Mashhad, Iran, slipped off the runway and burst into flames, killing 29 of the 148 people on board and injuring 47, state-run television reported at the time.

More than 90 people, including 80 journalists, were killed in December 2005 when a military plane crashed into a building in Tehran. In February 2002, a Tupolev TU-154 operated by Iran Air Tours crashed in Khorramabad, Iran, killing all 118 people on board.

With no domestic aviation industry, the country is dependent on foreign manufacturers for its planes. But trade sanctions in place for the past three decades have hampered access to spare parts as well as purchases of more modern aircraft, particularly from American manufacturers like Boeing. In 2005, the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, warned that sanctions flouted international treaties and placed civilian lives in danger.