February 21, 2003, Friday All-round Metro Edition
SECTION: WORLD; Pg. 9
LENGTH: 509 words
HEADLINE: 302 dead in Iranian army air disaster
SOURCE: AP, AFP BYLINE: * Correspondents in Tehran
BODY: RESCUE workers last night found the wreckage of an Iranian military plane that crashed in southeastern Iran, killing all 302 on board in the country's worst plane disaster. The plane, with members of the elite Revolutionary Guards on board, was enroute from Zahedan, on the Pakistan border, to Kerman, about 800km southeast of Tehran. It crashed in a mountainous area about 32km from its destination. Rescue workers who rushed to the crash scene reported they had found the wings of the Russian-made Antonov plane but spent yesterday combing the countryside for other wreckage. There were no survivors. Investigators still have no idea what caused the accident but hinted bad weather may have played a part. There was heavy snowfall in many parts of Iran yesterday, including in Zahedan, which hadn't seen snow in three years. "Air traffic controllers at Kerman airport said the pilot had radioed bad weather, including strong winds, before losing contact," at around 5.30pm (0100 AEDT), an hour after takeoff, the official IRNA news agency reported. The crash was the latest in a string of air disasters in Iran mostly involving Russian-built aircraft. A Ukrainian An-140 aircraft flew into a mountainside on December 23 last year while preparing to land at an airport near the central city of Isfahan, killing all 46 engineers on board. That crash, which was blamed on pilot error, was a major blow for Iran's fledgling domestic aircraft manufacturing industry which the foreign engineers had been involved in setting up. In February, 2002 a Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154 airliner, carrying 119 people, smashed into snow-covered mountains not far from its destination of Khorramabad, 370km southwest of Tehran. Almost a year ago, 230 people, most of them Revolutionary Guards, narrowly escaped with their lives when an Ilyushin-76 transport caught fire soon after takeoff from the northeastern city of Mashhad. Iran has been hit hard by a 24-year-old US embargo on the transfer of key technology that could have been used to update its ageing fleet of passenger jets. At the end of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in 1988 the Iranian transport ministry agreed to lease Russian aircraft which had often been in service for many years in the former Soviet Union. Yesterday's death toll surpassed the 290 killed on July 3, 1988 when an Iran Air A300 Airbus was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes in the closing stages of the Islamic republic's bloody eight-year war with Iraq. The Revolutionary Guards, under the direct control of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are seen as the defenders of Iran's Islamic regime. The guards protect Iran's borders and defend ruling hardliners in this ultra-conservative society. Tehran television quoted an anonymous official as saying the soldiers had visited the impoverished Sistan-Baluchestan province, of which Zahedan is the capital, for an "important mission". The border province is notorious for drug trafficking from neighbouring Afghanistan.
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