Iran airliner crashes, 168 on Board feared dead

A passenger plane crashed on Wednesday in northwest Iran, and all on board were feared dead, state media reported. ( Watch

State TV said 168 people were killed when a passenger plane crashed in northwest Iran.

Iranian civil aviation organization spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh had told state television that 153 passengers and 15 crew members were on the Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet that had been headed from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan.

Footage from the scene on state-run Press TV showed a deep trench smashed into an agricultural field by the impact, littered with smoking wreckage. It showed a large chunk of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small pieces.

The Caspian Airlines jet was heading from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan when it crashed near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, state television said.

The Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the IRNA news agency that the plane was completely destroyed and shattered to pieces, and the wreckage was in flames. "It his highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed," Bahzadpour said. Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993.

Iran, which has been under years of international sanctions, has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade.

Twenty-nine people were killed in September 2006 when an airliner came off the runway after landing in the eastern city of Mashhad and burst into flames.

In November 2006, an Iranian military plane crashed on takeoff at Tehran's Mehrabad airport, killing all 39 people on board, including 30 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards force

Iran's civil and military fleet is made up of ancient aircraft in very poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance. The Iranian regime is barred by sanctions from buying American Boeing planes or European Airbus craft when they include a significant number of US parts.

Caspian Airlines was established in 1992 in Tehran, according to its website.

It 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, Turkey.