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On Wednesday morning, a Boeing 737 of Ukrainian Airlines crashed soon after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport, killing all 176 passengers carried.
“There was a total of 167 passengers along with nine crew members on the plane,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Oleksiy Valeriyovych said and added, “all people on board lost their lives.”
The Boeing 737-800 takes off for Kyiv at around 6 a.m. local time from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran.
Early photos from the press revealed that emergency workers were looking for the airliner’s wreckage outside of Tehran. However, Ukrainian International Airlines later confirmed that all personnel on board were dead and told that most of the victims belonged to Iran, Ukraine, Canada and Sweden. Airlines from most parts of the world postponed their travel to Tehran until further notice.
In a separate statement, the Foreign Minister of Ukraine said that people on the plane were also from Britain, Germany and Afghanistan.
The Reason for the Boeing 737 crash
An airline spokesperson revealed during a press conference that nothing was wrong with the Ukrainian plane and that it carried through a team of experienced crew.
The cause of the crash is unknown. However, Iran’s Fars News reports suggest the plane crashed mainly because of technical issues. The agency did not mention any details in its reports.
The Ukrainian embassy in Iraq briefed in a statement that the engine failure caused the crash. However, they later removed the statement, saying that any comments about the root cause of the plane’s crash before the commission’s verdict would not be official.
Reuters reported about the crash of a Ukrainian airliner, mentioning Ukraine’s International Airlines’ official statement that it’s taking all possible measures to determine the real source of the incident and will do a systematic investigation.
President Zelensky instructed the country’s prosecutor general to arrange open criminal proceedings for the air crash.
Iran’s state television told the heads of Emergency Management and members of Civil Aviation in a telephone briefing that Shahriar, near Tehran, was the crash site. Emergency services said that flames at the site were so intense that they halted the rescue efforts.
International Airlines of Ukraine stated that it has 42 planes in its fleet and operates around 1110 weekly flights. However, the airline waited to respond to the request to share more information.
Boeing says in a statement that it is attentive to the situation in Iran and will gather more information about the crash.
Location of air clash
The Ukrainian airliner crashed at a time when tensions between the U.S. and Iran were already mounting. “American airlines are banned from flying over Iran because of the risk of commercial aeroplanes being mistaken as military aircraft,” the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States said in a statement.
FIightradar24 reported some other non-American airlines have also routed their flights to avoid using Iraqi and Iranian airspace.