TEHRAN, 7 December 2005 — The wing of a military transport plane — loaded with Iranian journalists and trying to make an emergency landing after developing engine trouble — clipped the top of a 10-story apartment building, and the aircraft slammed to earth at the base of the structure, gouging out a huge crater and igniting a major fire. At least 128 people were killed.
All 94 people on the plane were killed, most of them Iranian radio and television journalists heading to cover military maneuvers in the south. Thirty-four residents of the apartment building also died, and 90 were injured, Tehran state radio said.
Flames leaped out of windows, from the roof and several other floors of the building as panicked residents fled the Towhid complex, a series of high-rise apartment buildings for air force personnel in the Azadi suburb of Tehran.
Most of the plane made impact at the base of the building, scattering wreckage over a wide area, smashing parked cars and damaging support columns on the structure.
Witness Mohammad Khatibi said the fuselage of the aircraft fell nearly straight down after the wing hit the top of the structure.
Firefighters managed to put out the fire, and police cordoned the building and debris field, preventing journalists and a crowd of as many as 10,000 people from getting close to the site.
Many in the crowd were screaming, afraid their relatives had been killed. Several hours after the crash, the building still was smoldering, with black smoke hanging in the air.
“It was like an earthquake,” said Reza Sadeqi, a 25-year-old merchant, who saw the plane hit the building. “The force of the crash threw me about 3 meters (9 feet) inside my shop. I felt the heat of the fire caused by the crash. It was like being in hell,” he said.
The C-130 aircraft had just taken off from the nearby Mehrabad Airport en route to Bandar Abbas, a port city in southern Iran, when it developed engine trouble and was returning to the airport for an emergency landing. It lost altitude because of the engine failure and the pilot was unable to maintain altitude to miss the apartment compound, state-run television said, discounting sabotage or terrorism.
