Iranian State TV has confirmed that a plane traveling between the country's capital Tehran and Yerevan, capital of Armenia, crashed only 16 minutes after take-off. Reports indicate all 168 passengers and crew are dead.
Update: All passengers confirmed dead
Caspian Air Flight 7908 took off from the International Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran shortly after 11:15 a.m. local time. As it was heading Northwest over the Qazvin province, near the village of Jannatabad, the Russian made Tupolev jet reportedly fell to the ground.
The crash happened approximately 90 miles (140 kilometers) from Tehran and according to both
CNN and the
BBC early pictures from the scene show a huge crater in the ground, with debris, including the passports of those aboard, spread over a wide area.
Press TV, the Iranian official English-language satellite television network,
reports, "Qazvin Police Chief Hossein Behzadpour and Mohammad Reza Montazer Khorasan, the head of the disaster management centre in Iran's health ministry, both confirmed that all 168 people on board have been killed in the crash. "
CNN reports it's been three years since the last crash involving a Tupolev jet in Iran, with the
BBC adding that the country's civil and military fleets are both "in poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance".
Trade sanctions imposed on Iran by the West, after the present regime came to power during the 1979 revolution, have increasingly led the country to rely on the purchase of planes from Russia.
