Photo Caspian Airlines Plane Crash: 168 Passengers Most Probably Dead.

A Caspian Airlines plane Tupolev TU-154M, flight RV-7908 from Tehran Imam Khomeini (Iran) to Yerevan (Armenia) with 153 passengers and 15 crew, crashed about 16 minutes after takeoff from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport in the vicinity of the village of Janat-Abad (Qazvin province of Iran) about 120km (65nm) westnorthwest of Tehran. The Caspian Airlines Jet broke up and burst into flames at 11:49 local time (07:19Z), all occupants are feared dead.

Iranian state media say a passenger of Caspian Airlines has crashed in northwestern Iran, killing all 168 people on board.

State television said Wednesday the Caspian Airlines plane was heading to the Armenian capital of Yerevan when it went down near the northern Iranian city of Qazvin. Media reports say the Caspian Airlines crashed 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Video footage shows a field littered with small pieces of smoking wreckage from the Caspian Airlines plane.

Officials say the Caspian Airlines plane was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members.

Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture that was founded in the early 1990s.

Iran has frequent Caspian Airlines plane crashes, often due to poor maintenance of aging planes.

Initial reports from Iran suggest, the Caspian Airlines plane may have been EP-CPG. The pilot had reported technical trouble.

Local police and fire services report, that the Caspian Airlines plane left an impact crater of about 10 meters depth, the debris spread over an area of just 200 square meters.

In the past, Tehran has blamed its plane problems in part on U.S. sanctions that it says prevents Iran from getting spare parts. But Caspian airliners are Russian made planes whose maintenance would be less impaired by U.S. sanctions.

Qazvin Police Chief Hossein Behzadpour said Wednesday that all on board are “most probably” dead.

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