Boeing 737 belonging to Ukraine International Airlines with 180 passengers onboard crashed due to technical problems near an airport in the capital, Tehran, state TV reported. As per first report all 170 on board killed in accident .
The plane had taken off from Iran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport, the report said. The crash is suspected to have been caused by mechanical issues, it added.
An investigation team was at the site of the crash in southwestern outskirts of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh said.
The crash came hours after iran attack on US forces in retaliation for the killing of Revolutionary Guard General Qassem Soleimani.
“The fierce revenge by the Revolutionary Guards has begun,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in a statement on a Telegram channel.
Hossein Soleimani, the editor-in-chief of Mashregh, the main Revolutionary Guards news website, said that short-range ballistic missiles had been fired at the US base at Asad, in Anbar.
We are aware of the media reports out of Iran and we are gathering more information,” Boeing spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in an email.
Ukraine International representatives weren’t immediately reachable. The Ukrainian consulate in Tehran declined to comment.
Website planefinder.net, which tracks flights worldwide, listed the two-engine aircraft as three years old, saying it was delivered in July 2016.
Boeing is already mired in crisis following crashes in October 2018 and last March. Those disasters, which killed nearly 350 people, involved the U.S. manufacturer’s 737 Max jet, which has been grounded globally for 10 months. The 737-800 and 737 Max are both variants of Boeing’s 737 narrow-body planes but the 737-800 hasn’t been grounded.
Boeing is still developing a fix for the flaws discovered in a flight-control system new to the 737 Max model. The 737-800 that is reported to have crashed near Tehran on Wednesday didn’t have that system.
