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Plane Crash in Tehran Kills 115
Iranian air force personnel carry a body from the crash site in Tehran. In addition to journalists en route to cover military exercises, those killed included 21 on the ground.
(Reuters)
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Reporters who arrived to cover the disaster wept when they realized many of the dead were colleagues. State television played mournful music as it broadcast images of people killed in the crash.
"I was supposed to be on the plane as well, so I don't know whether to be happy or sad," a journalist from the ISNA student news agency told Reuters.
The plane was bound for the port city of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman, where Iran's military was conducting exercises. It took off about 1:35 p.m. from the military section of the airport.
Mehrabad, an aging but convenient airport, has remained open despite the completion last year of the much larger Imam Khomeini International Airport, about 30 miles south of Tehran.
The cause of the crash was not reported, but state television said officials had ruled out sabotage. There have been three major fatal aircraft accidents in Iran since 2002.
News reports said the Lockheed C-130, a four-engine turboprop, may have been acquired from the United States when Iran was a U.S. ally and ruled by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The monarchy was overthrown by the 1979 revolution that established an Islamic state.
U.S. trade sanctions against Iran have led to chronic shortages of aircraft spare parts. The Bush administration this year held out the possibility of lifting the sanction on airline parts as a bargaining chip in negotiations over the future of Iran's nuclear program.
"We see lots of airplanes landing in the airport every day," said Sadegh Jalaliyan, who noticed the C-130 while smoking a cigarette in the yard of the dairy where he works, south of the airport. "I immediately recognized something was wrong with it. It was unusually low.
"I shouted to my friends and showed them the plane. Then there was a terrible explosion and a huge column of thick smoke."
Vick reported from Istanbul.
