80 dead as Iran airliner bursts into flames
Pastor Dale Morgan
Friday September 1, 9:35 PM
*
80 dead as Iran airliner bursts into flames*
At least 80 passengers have been killed when an Iranian airliner caught
fire after one of its tyres burst on landing in the northeastern city of
Mashhad, state television said.
The Russian-made Tupolev 154, on an internal flight from the southern
port of Bandar Abbas, skidded off the runway and crashed into the nearby
barriers, leaving gaping holes in the fuselage, it said.
The incident was just 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.
There were 148 passengers on board the flight, the television said,
adding that some of survivors are in critical condition. An earlier
report had said that the all remaining passengers not accounted as dead
had been saved.
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.
Rescue workers were still using hoses to douse the plane, turning the
ground around into a quagmire of mud and water. Several corpses were on
the ground beside the plane, swathed in blankets.
"As the plane was landing one of its tyres burst, forcing to it to
swerve off the runway before hitting nearby barriers and bursting into
flames," an airport official in Mashhad told AFP.
"The pilots are trained to control the plane in such conditions so we
have to find out what happened. There are three holes in the plane's
fuselage."
A medical official in Mashhad was quoted as saying in the Iranian media
that at least 25 survivors had been taken to Mashhad there.
Another airport official told the IRNA agency that "around 50 people
survived the plane crash" which took place around 1345 local time (1015
GMT)." All the flight crew survived, he added.
US sanctions mean that Iran can only shop for Airbus or Boeing planes on
the used market, and Iranian officials have blamed the blockade for the
regular plane crashes in the Islamic republic.
The sanctions cover not only American-made airplanes and spare parts,
but also European ones, like Airbus, when they use significant elements
of US origin.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has been subject to tough US
sanctions that hinder the purchase of critical spare parts for nearly
all the planes in its air force, civilian flag carrier Iran Air and
domestic airlines.
In December, 108 people, many of them journalists, were killed when a
Lockheed C-130 transport plane crashed in a densely populated area of
Tehran. The plane had been bought from the United States before 1979 and
was starved of spare parts.
The crash comes as Iran is threatened with further sanctions over its
controversial nuclear programme after it failed to meet a deadline on
Thursday to suspend sensitive uranium encrichment operations.
The United States, which is leading a drive to impose UN Security
Council sanctions, has predicted that the new penalties will be agreed
as early as September.
Media reports have indicated that new sanctions would start with a
travel ban for Iranian nuclear officials, ratcheting up later to more
severe measures such as restrictions on commercial airline flights.