Iranian Plane Crashes; 302 Die

A military plane carrying members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards crashed Wednesday in a desolate eastern region of the country, killing all 302 people on board, the state news agency reported.

The plane lost contact with air traffic controllers after reporting bad weather and strong winds on its route from Zahedan, near the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan, to Kerman, about 230 miles to the northwest.

It crashed half an hour later near the village of Balbuyeh, about 50 miles from its destination.

Much of Iran has been buffeted by snowstorms this week, but state-run media did not immediately specify a cause for the crash.

The plane, identified by the official news agency as a Russian-made Ilyushin, went down around 5:30 p.m., as night was falling over Iran’s east, a desolate region overrun by bandits and drug smugglers.

Rescue workers descended on the scene early today and began finding wreckage from the plane.

All of those on board, except for the crew, were members of the Revolutionary Guards, a military force separate from the Iranian army whose mission is to safeguard the country’s Islamic Revolution. It is under the direct control of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Officials released no information immediately on where the Revolutionary Guards were based or whether their trip was part of a military mission.

Iran has suffered several serious accidents recently involving aging Russian-built aircraft that form the bulk of its fleet, and the perilous state of aviation is a matter of much internal debate.

But a U.S. trade embargo against Iran prevents it from purchasing American-made planes. The sanctions imposed in 1995 even block Iran from buying used European-made Airbuses because of the U.S. parts they contain.

Last February, 119 people were killed when a Russian-made Tupolev went down near Khorramabad in western Iran. That crash led to the resignation of the country’s civil aviation chief.

Another Ilyushin also belonging to the Revolutionary Guards caught fire in flight that same month, but landed safely.

In December, a Ukrainian Antonov-140 crashed near Isfahan, killing all 46 people on board. Many of them were Russian or Ukrainian aerospace scientists and executives coming to Iran to watch the first flight of a new plane developed in a joint Ukrainian-Iranian program.

Iran’s previous worst air disaster occurred in 1988, when the U.S. cruiser Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iran Air passenger plane over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board.