Twenty-nine Dead As Passenger Plane Catches Fire On Landing

Twenty-nine people were killed in Iran when a passenger plane caught fire after landing, reports AFP:

TEHERAN: Twenty-nine people were killed yesterday when an Iranian airliner caught fire after landing in the northeastern city of Mashhad, the civil aviation chief said, lowering earlier reports of up to 80 dead.

Talking to state television, the Civil Aviation Organisation’s Nurollah Rezai Niaraki said 29 bodies had been recovered from the plane, 43 people were injured and the rest of the 148 people on board survived unhurt.

State television had earlier said the death toll on the flight to Mashhad from the southern port city of Bandar Abbas was at least 80.

Niaraki also said that since the flight crew survived the crash, a better understanding on the cause of the accident would surface.

Previously, state media reported that the Russian-made Tupolev 154 skidded off the runway and crashed into the nearby barriers, leaving gaping holes in the fuselage.

The incident was the latest tragedy to hit Iran’s aviation industry, whose fleet is made up largely of Soviet or old Western planes owing to the US sanctions imposed after the Islamic revolution in 1979.

According to figures published in the Iranian media and not counting yesterday’s accident, more than 1,460 people were killed in 17 air crashes in the past 25 years, including an Iranian plane shot down over the Gulf by a US warship in 1988.

The first television pictures showed the plane, owned by the Iran Airtours carrier, lying flat without its wheels on the outskirts of the airport, with one huge hole burned out in the centre of the fuselage.

An Iranian civil aviation official was quoted in the media as saying the plane did not ask for an emergency landing before the accident. — AFP