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IranAir flight carrying 103 crashes
No fatalities officially confirmed after flight from Tehran goes down near Orumiyeh.
Last Modified: 09 Jan 2011 18:58 GMT
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Fifty out of the 103 passengers and crew on board an IranAir passenger jet which crashed en route to a northwestern city in the country have survived the accident, according to Iranian government sources.
The aircraft crashed near Orumiyeh at around 16:15 GMT, an official in West Azerbaijan province was quoted by state television's website as saying.
"The airplane took off an hour later than scheduled time from Tehran towards Orumiyeh and because of bad weather conditions came down in a village area near Orumiyeh," the unidentified official said.
Gholam Reza Masoumi, the country's emergency services chief and media, said: "So far no reports of death have been reported."
Al Jazeera's Alireza Ronaghi, reporting from Tehran, said that roughly 70cm of snow has blanketed the ground in the Orumiyeh, around 700km north of Tehran.
"This plane has been one of these very old kind of aircraft that are still serving in Iran's airlines - a Boeing 727, which is more than 40 years old," he said.
The US-made aircraft has been out of production since 1984.
The semi-official Fars news agency initially reported that 105 people people were believed to be on board, but an official statement said that there were 95 passengers and eight crew members in total.
Passenger airline crashes are not uncommon in Iran, where sanctions have prevented Iran from purchasing parts for its commercial fleet.
Source:
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