A Caspian Airlines jet carrying 168 people has crashed into a field in northwest Iran, killing all those on board.
Seven passengers were foreigners from Armenia and Georgia and all the other passengers were Iranians.
Two black boxes of a passenger plane, which crashed near the Iranian city of Qazvin, have been found and search is underway to find the third one, an official said.
Ahmad Majidi, Head of the Crisis Working Group of Iran’s Road and Transportation Ministry told IRNA that experts from Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) have recovered the two boxes.
Majidi noted that the black boxes of the Tupolev plane were heavily damaged but experts are trying to retrieve data from them.
“If efforts to retrieve data from the boxes fail, they will be sent back to the country that has produced them so that they could be repaired in order to find the reason behind the crash,” he noted.
He said that the plane was smashed into pieces after the crash.
Caspian Airways flight 7908 went down 16 minutes after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini international airport – at 11:33am (07:03 GMT), according to aviation authorities.
Crying relatives and friends of those who died on board the flight gathered at Yerevan airport after hearing the news on Wednesday, where a notice on a wall listed people who were on the flight. Some of those gathered had to be treated for shock by medical personnel.
Agencies / Press TV
