VIDEO: Survivors ‘unlikely’ among 176 onboard Ukrainian airliner crash outside Tehran

An official told state media that finding survivors among the passengers and crew members was “unlikely.”

Kurdistan 24 2020/01/08 05:48

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – A Ukrainian airliner heading to Kiev early Tuesday crashed shortly after takeoff from an airport at the Iranian capital of Tehran. An official told state media that finding survivors among the passengers and crewmembers was “unlikely.”

The plane that crashed was a Ukrainian Boeing 737-800, carrying 167 passengers and nine crew members, according to an “accurate” preliminary report on the incident, state-run ISNA quoted the spokesperson of the Iranian civil aviation agency, Reza Jaafarzaddeh, as saying.

The plane took off at 6:12 a.m. local time from the Imam Khomeini International Airport, outside Tehran, Jaafarzaddeh continued. Six minutes later, it crashed between the towns of Shahrayar and Parand to the west of the national capital.

The flight was scheduled to take off about an hour earlier but appears to have been delayed.

The Iranian Red Crescent has said it is “unlikely” to find survivors amid the debris at the crash site, which photos showed to be at a public place near several homes in the surrounding area.

Jaafarzaddeh later confirmed all the people on board had been killed.

The incident comes just a few hours after Iran carried out a series of cross-border missile strikes against Iraqi bases that house American troops, in an operation dubbed “Martyr Soleimani,” widely publicized by Iranian media as Tehran’s “severe revenge.”

There were no casualties, according to US officials.

The Iranian operation was a response to the US killing of a top Iranian military commander, Qasim Soleimani, along with an Iraqi militia chief, Abu Mahdi Muhandis, in a drone strike in Baghdad on Friday.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany