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168 people killed in Iran plane crash
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-07-15 20:01

168 people killed in Iran plane crash
In this photo released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), people gather at the scene of a plane crash near the village of Jannatabad, outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran in Iran, Wednesday, July 15, 2009. [Agencies]

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences "to the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei and the families of the dead" over what he called a "heart-wrenching tragedy" and ordered an investigation into the cause. Armenia's president, Serge Sarkisian, also expressed his condolences and declared Thursday a day of mourning.

Also among the passengers were eight members of Iran's national youth judo team, along with two trainers and a delegation chief, who were scheduled to train with the Armenian judo team before attending competitions in Hungary on Aug. 6, state TV said.

The crash is the worst since February 2003, when a Russian-made Ilyushin 76 carrying members of the elite Revolutionary Guards crashed in the mountains of southeastern Iran, killing 302 people aboard.

Caspian Airlines is an Iranian-Russian joint venture founded in 1993 whose fleet is made up of Tupolevs.

Soviet-built Tupolev and Antonov planes have long been the mainstays of the civil air fleets in Russia and former Soviet republics. Once considered reliable aircraft, the most widely used models — like the Tu-154 — have in recent years gone largely unmodified or updated by aircraft designers.

The Soviet collapse resulted in the sharp decline in government funding for aircraft spare parts manufacturers and for the aircraft manufactures themselves, and many airlines fell behind in maintenance programs for the planes.

Iran has about a dozen Soviet-built Tu-154 airliners. In 2006, Russia negotiated the sale of five Tu-204s to Iran.

In February 2006, a Russian-made Tu-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated with Iran's national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.

The crashes have also affected Iran's military. In December 2005, 115 people were killed when a US-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-story building near Tehran's Mehrabad airport. In Nov. 2007, a Russian-made Iranian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff killing 36 Revolutionary Guards members.