An Iranian plane had to make an emergency landing on Sunday in Tehran right after take-off, the official news agency IRNA reported, according to dpa. The Tupelev airplane, owned by Iranian airline Mahan, was on its way from Tehran to the Persian Gulf port of Mahshahr when it was forced to return to the capital's Mehrabad airport. A spokesman of the civil aviation organization told IRNA that both plane and passengers were safe. He declined to give any further details on the incident pending technical inspections. The incident in Tehran was the third of its kind within the last three weeks. The first was a fatal crash of a Caspian Airlines plane on July 15 in Qazvin, which killed all 168 people on board. The second was last Friday when a Kazakh plane rented by Iran's Aria airways caught fire while landing in Mashad in north-eastern Iran. Sixteen people, including 12 Kazakh crew members and the Russian pilot, were killed in the incident. There were also reports of another emergency landing on Saturday in Oroumieh, in north-western Iran, but the reports could not be confirmed.
