Europe
6 years ago

Turkish private jet crash claims 11 lives

AP photo used for representational purpose.
AP photo used for representational purpose.

Published :

Updated :

A Turkish private jet flying a group of young women from the United Arab Emirates to Istanbul crashed Sunday in heavy rain in a mountainous region of Iran, killing all 11 people on board.

Days earlier, the doomed aircraft carried a bachelorette party bound for Dubai, although it was not clear who was on the plane when it crashed, reports AP.

Iranian state television quoted a spokesman for the country’s emergency management organisation as saying the plane hit a mountain near Shahr-e Kord and burst into flames.

Shahr-e Kord is some 370 kilometers (230 miles) south of the capital, Tehran.

The spokesman, Mojtaba Khaledi, later told a website associated with state TV that local villagers had reached the site in the Zagros Mountains and found only badly burned bodies and no survivors.

The plane took off late Sunday afternoon and climbed to a cruising altitude of just over 35,000 feet.

A little over an hour later, it rapidly gained altitude and then dropped drastically within minutes, according to FlightRadar24, a flight-tracking website.

The flight took off from Sharjah International Airport, according to the General Civil Aviation Authority in the UAE.

Iranian emergency management officials said all the passengers were young women, according to state television IRNA.

Sunday’s crash comes less than a month after an Iranian ATR-72, a twin-engine turboprop used for short regional flights, crashed in southern Iran, killing all 65 people aboard.

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