A passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed Wednesday in northwest Iran, and all on board were feared dead, state media reported. The Caspian Airlines jet was heading from Teheran to the Armenian capital Yerevan when it crashed near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of Qazvin, around 120 kilometers northwest of Teheran, state television said. The Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the IRNA news agency that the plane was completely destroyed and shattered to pieces, and the wreckage was in flames.
"It his highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed," Bahzadpour said. He did not give a number, but state TV said 168 were on the flight. Reza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for Iran's Civil Aviation Organization, was quoted as saying that there was still no precise information regarding the passengers of the plane. He said a delegation was sent to the scene soon after the event was reported but that the cause of the crash was unclear.
Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993..Iran has frequent plane crashes, which it blames on US sanctions on the country that prevent it from getting spare parts for aging airplanes. Caspian Airlines, however, uses Russian-made aircraft whose maintenance would be less impaired by American sanctions.
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