|
Iranian Plane Crashed With Transport Minister Onboard
TEHRAN, May 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An aircraft carrying 24 passengers, including Iranian Transport Minister Rahman Dadman, two deputy ministers, and seven members of parliament, crashed Thursday after it had vanished off radar screens, killing all aboard, an interior ministry official said.
Thirty-two people were believed to be aboard the Russian-made Yak-40 belonging to the Faraz-e Qeshm company.
The interior ministry said wreckage of the plane had been found in a mountainous area between Gorgan and Shahroud, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) east of Sari in Mazandaran Province, although officials from the carrier, Faraz-e Qeshm airlines, said it could not confirm the report.
But state television quoted Golestan province governor Ali Asghar Ahmadi as saying search-and-rescue teams were still searching for the craft in the mountainous Abr area.
The pilot of the plane that left Tehran with 8 crewmembers heading for Gorgan in Golestan had radioed before contact with the control tower was broken that he was planning either to return to Tehran or make an emergency landing in the northern Iranian city of Sari - 300 kilometers (200 miles) north of Tehran - adding that a storm was raging, IRNA said earlier.
Mohammad-Ali Tavakoli, a civil aviation official in Tehran, had previously said, "We feel the plane very probably made an emergency landing, and we don't think it crashed."
The official Iranian news agency IRNA did not confirm the crash either, saying the plane, which had disappeared off radar screens 10 minutes away from the city, might have been able to land in northern Mazandaran province.
Crash victim Dadman, who was appointed transport minister in a cabinet reshuffle in January, is a former head of Iran railways and an influential reformist politician close to President Mohammad Khatami.
Born in 1956 in the northwestern city of Ardebil, near the Caspian Sea, he was active in student politics before the 1979 Islamic revolution and took part in the takeover of the U.S. embassy, according to official biographical details, news agencies reported.
He was a member of the central council of the main reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, headed by the brother of President Khatami, Mohammad-Reza.
Dadman was married with four children.
The Yak-40 is a small Soviet-designed three-engine airliner, commuter plane and business jet, which entered service in 1968. It can carry around 30 passengers and has a cruising speed of around 500 kilometers an hour.
The city of Sari was the scene of a football stadium collapse on May 6th, which killed two people and injured nearly 300.
The incident comes at a time of heightened tension in Iran ahead of elections, which will determine the future of incumbent President Khatami's reform movement, which has met staunch resistance from hardline conservatives.
|
