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300
Iranian Elite Troops, Crew Die In Plane Crash
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The plane was on a flight from the southeastern town of Zahedan
when it came down about 35 kilometers east of the city of Kerman
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TEHRAN,
February 20 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - More than 300
people aboard an Iranian troop transport aircraft including top brass
were killed Wednesday, February 19, when it crashed shortly before
landing in the southeast of the country, in one of the world's worst
air accidents.
The
Russian-made Ilyushin plane was carrying 284 elite Revolutionary
Guards and 18 crew on a flight from the southeastern town of Zahedan
when it came down about 35 kilometers (more than 20 miles) east of the
city of Kerman, official media said.
There
were no survivors, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.
Rescue
workers who rushed to the crash scene reported that they had found the
wings of the aircraft but were still combing the countryside for other
wreckage early Thursday, February 20.
State
media stressed that investigators still had no idea what caused the
accident but hinted that bad weather may have played a part.
"Air
traffic controllers at Kerman airport said the pilot had radioed bad
weather, including strong winds, before losing contact" at around
5:30 pm (1400 GMT), an hour after take-off, the official IRNA news
agency reported.
The
dead soldiers were all serving in the Guards' Imam Ali battalion in
Sistan-Baluchistan, a border province centered on Zahedan which is
notorious for drug-trafficking from neighboring Afghanistan, AFP said.
The
Iranian cabinet issued a statement offering its condolences to the
families of the dead over this tragic event.
Wreck,
Bodies, Found
Searchers
found Thursday the wreck the plane, rescue workers told an AFP
correspondent near the scene.
An
official said the plane had hit a mountain and exploded.
Rescue
workers were hampered by a severe snowstorm.
State
radio said searchers using helicopters were hampered by thick fog and
strong winds, while access by road was also difficult.
Officials
said 60 specialist mountaineers of the Iranian Red Crescent would be
joined by 200 more during the morning. The army and the Revolutionary
Guards were also involved.
Relatives
of the victims, who included a number of senior officers, were also
arriving in the area.
Iran
has had a poor air accident record in recent years, with the crash of
a Ukrainian Antonov An-140 near the central city of Esfahan killing 44
people, most of them Russian and Ukrainian aeronautical engineers,
only in December 2002.
That
crash, which was blamed on pilot error, was a major blow for Iran's
fledgling domestic aircraft manufacturing industry which the foreign
engineers were involved in helping to set up.
A
year ago on Monday, 230 people, most of them Revolutionary Guards
narrowly escaped with their lives when an Ilyushin-76 transport caught
fire soon after take-off from the northeastern city of Mashhad. The
pilot managed to make a successful emergency landing.
Also
in February 2002, a civilian Tupolev-154 on an internal flight crashed
in southwestern Iran with the loss of all 119 people on board.
The
world's worst air accidents remain the collision of two Boeing 747 in
the Canary islands in 1977, which killed 583 people, and the crash of
a Japan Airlines jumbo between Tokyo and Osaka in 1985, which killed
520 people.
In
1988, an Iranian civilian Airbus was shot down by a U..S warship over
the Straits of Hormuz in the closing stages of the Islamic republic's
bloody eight-year war with Iraq, with the loss of all 290 people on
board.
Iran
has been hit hard by a 24-year-old U.S. embargo on the transfer of key
technology that could have been used to update its ageing fleet of
passenger jets as the vast country is confronted with strong demand on
domestic flights.
At
the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in 1988 the
Iranian transport ministry agreed to leasing Russian aircraft which
had often been in service for many years in the former Soviet Union.
The
country's largest airline, Iran Air, has a fleet of about 30
aircrafts, most of them U.S.-made Boeings, but which were bought
before the 1979 revolution.
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