An Iranian passenger aircraft flying from Tehran to Yerevan in neighboring Armenia crashed into a field about 16 minutes after take-off Wednesday. All 168 people on board were killed, Iranian media reported. The Caspian Airlines Tupolev (Tu-154) crashed near the Iranian city of Qazvin about 150 km north of Tehran, the airline's representative in Yerevan in Armenia, Arlen Davudyan, said. “On board the plane there were 151 adults, 2 children and 15 crew members,” he said. The passengers included 10 members of Iran's junior national judo team who were scheduled to train with the Armenian judo team before attending competitions in Hungary on Aug. 6, officials and media reports said. Davudyan said around 20-25 passengers were Armenian citizens. A senior Iranian provincial official, Sirous Saberi, said the aircraft had experienced technical problems and had tried to do an emergency landing. “Unfortunately the plane caught fire in the air and it crashed,” he told semi-official Fars News Agency. Witnesses said the plane exploded after it dropped of out of the sky, and television images showed a vast crater at the disaster site littered with debris of plane parts, shoes and clothes. At Yerevan's airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and the sister's 6- and 11-year-old sons, who were due on the flight. “What will I do without them?” she said, weeping, before she collapsed to the floor. The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but Iran has frequent crashes that are blamed on poor maintenance of its aging fleet. Hossein Ayaznia, an aviation police official, said emergency workers were searching for the plane's black box. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences for the deaths and urging a swift investigation of the cause. Caspian Airlines was established in 1992. Its website said it operates more than 50 regular and numerous charter flights each week between Iranian cities and international flights to Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Ukraine, Armenia, Belarus and Turkey. In September 2006, 29 people were killed when an Iran Air Tour Tupolev 154 passenger plane caught fire on landing in the northeastern city of Mashhad. In 2002, all 118 people aboard were killed when an Iran Air Tours Tupolev 154 crashed near the western city of Khorramabad.
