TEHRAN, 10 May 2004 — The Iranian Army kept Tehran’s new airport shut yesterday in a row over a foreign operator that saw the military take control of Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA) after a maiden commercial flight.
The facility will remain closed until the armed forces have “seen the cancellation of the contract with the Turkish company and a new contract (signed) with Iranian firms”, said armed forces commander Gen. Alireza Afshar.
He told the Mehr news agency that Saturday’s shutdown was enforced for “security reasons” and had the approval of President Mohammad Khatami. Just hours after an Emirates plane touched down from Dubai, army vehicles were deployed on the tarmac to prevent any further landings, although the aircraft owned by the southern Gulf emirate was allowed to return home.
An Iran Air plane, however, was diverted to Isfahan, some 500 kilometers away. The aircraft was even warned of anti-aircraft fire and two warplanes were scrambled to escort it to Isfahan, according to the reformist daily Shargh.
Soldiers and elite Revolutionary Guard troops sealed off the airport, according to various sources. Tepe-Akfen-Vie (TAV), an Austrian-Turkish consortium, has been at the center of problems which delayed the opening of IKIA, which is designed to replace the congested and ageing Mehrabad International closer to Tehran.
The army has launched a campaign in the pages of Iran’s conservative newspapers against the awarding of the license to TAV, which it says has business interests in Israel, archfoe of Tehran.
“The granting of contracts to Turkish and Emirati companies poses a security problem at the airport,” said Afshar. He said the armed forces had delivered a report to the Supreme National Security Council, which is headed by Hassan Rowhani, who had in turn asked the Transport Ministry to scrap the contract with TAV.
The Civil Defense Authority, meanwhile, was on the defensive yesterday. “There has never been a contract with the Turkish company. It was simply a memorandum and we have asked the company’s agents to leave the airport,” civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told AFP.
“For the time being, the situation is normal at the airport, which is in the hands of civil aviation. But there will be no flight until the problem has been fully sorted out,” he said.
IKIA, in the middle of the desert about 45 kilometers south of the capital, was built at a cost of $350 million with a capacity of 2.5 million international and four million domestic passengers a year.
Officials had said the airport — a project first launched three decades ago — would eventually be able to handle 40 million passengers a year as a regional transport hub.
Khatami inaugurated the airport’s Terminal 1 with much fanfare on Feb. 1. It was due to start handling international flights at the end of March but has been hit by a series of delays.
Meanwhile, a former Iranian envoy to the UN’s nuclear watchdog was quoted as saying yesterday Iran should consider withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is not beneficial for the country. “The time has come for Iran to really put on its agenda pulling out of the NPT,” Mohammad Kiarashi, the former Iranian representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was quoted as saying.
