Iran plane crash: reasons revealed - UPDATE

Iranian Minister of Road and Transportation Hamid Behbahani said on Monday that bad weather and the pilot's lack of enough vision were causes of plane crash in northwestern part of the country, ISNA reported.

Behbahani confirmed no inferno occurred following the deadly incident and said, "so far 78 people were killed and some 24 were injured."

Also the Head of crisis management organization of Iranian Ministry of Road and Transportation Ahmad Majidi told ISNA that, the plane's black box has not been found yet. Boeing 727 planes have been operating in Iran for over three years and were delivered to the country in 1974 as used planes.

Majidi said, "105 people including 94 passengers and 11 crew members were on board at the time of the accident."

The aircraft was heading from capital Tehran to northwestern city of Orumiyeh.

"26 wounded individuals are hospitalized in Orumiyeh, one of them in critical condition," Majidi said adding an individual has gone missing following the plane crash.

Iranian Deputy Minister of Road and Transportation confirmed the plane was wrecked and said, "the pilot intended to return to Tehran after bad weather had made it impossible for him to land."

He also said, "pilot was dead after the crash."

The pilot reported to lack enough vision to land at the airport was made to bring down the plane in farmland where the accident occurred. The dead include 12 women and 42 men, but the identities of other 23 people have not been found yet.

Reports say the injured include18 men and 9 women, but 3 crew members are alive. The Boeing 727 which operated by Iran's national airline crashed at 19:45 pm local time on Sunday.

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10:35

At least 77 people were killed and 28 injured when an Iranian Boeing 727 passenger plane crashed in bad weather in northwestern Iran on Sunday, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent said.

Mahmoud Mozafar told that many of the injured were in a bad condition. He said 106 people, 12 crew members and 94 passengers, were on board the Iran Air plane when it crashed.

Another Red Crescent official, Heidar Heidari, told the state news agency IRNA, that the "death toll is expected to increase."

Relatives of people aboard gathered at Tehran's Mehrabad airport to get information from authorities.

Some officials said crashed just before landing at the airport in the city of Urumiyeh, located about 1,000 km (625 miles) northwest of the capital in a mountainous area near the border with Turkey.

One official said 50 people were rescued and that rescue operations were being hampered by snow and fog in the area.

Mozafar told state television "the plane was smashed into pieces but did not explode."

Shahrokh Nioushabadi, a spokesman for Iran's national airline, Iran Air, told the semi-official that two children were among the passengers.

Iran has suffered a string of crashes in the past few decades. The last major air crash in Iran was in July 2009 when a Caspian Airlines Tupolev aircraft bound for Armenia caught fire in mid-air and crashed into farmland near the city of Qazvin, killing all 168 people on board.

One of the country's worst air accidents happened in February 2003 when an Iranian Ilyushin-76 troop carrier crashed in southeast Iran, killing all 276 Revolutionary Guard soldiers and crew aboard.


/ILNA, Trend/