TEHRAN, 9 December 2005 — Tens of thousands of mourners packed central Tehran yesterday for a mass funeral for dozens of people killed when a military plane ploughed into a densely populated area of the Iranian capital.
With the authorities facing furious allegations that the decrepit plane should never have taken to the air, several officials sought to calm emotions by promising a full investigation into the disaster.
Official media said 106 bodies were recovered from the scene of the crash while an additional two people died in hospital. Among the dead were 68 journalists and photographers who were flying to the south of the country to report on army exercises.
Even ordinary people turned up to pay their respects as the coffins — containing 55 of the 82 charred bodies that authorities have managed to identify — rolled by with full military honors and covered in flowers and the Iranian flag.
The Lockheed C-130 transport workhorse — bought from the United States before the Islamic revolution nearly three decades ago and starved of spare parts — crashed in a heavily-populated area Tehran on Tuesday.
It plunged into the foot of a high-rise housing block having suffered engine failure immediately after taking off from central Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. All 94 passengers and crew plus several people on the ground were killed.
Iran’s air force is believed to have no more than around 15 C-130s in operation. It bought the planes, also known as Hercules, before the Islamic revolution when Iran was ruled by the Washington-backed shah.
Since then, clerical-ruled Iran has been subject to tough US sanctions, hindering the purchase of critical spare parts for all US-made planes in its air force, civilian flag carrier Iran Air and domestic airlines.
“The authorities must answer for what happened, and not use any more of these planes which are not fit to fly,” said Alipour, the civil servant watching the funeral. “There is fate, but there are also mistakes.” Mahmoud Katanchi, a local shop owner, echoed those concerns.
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered a probe, and parliament speaker Gholam Ali Hadad-Adel also publicly pledged to the mourners that the assembly “will make extreme efforts to follow up the cause of the accident and prevent repeats of such accidents”.
“This will be followed up very precisely by the armed forces to calm the families of the victims,” promised Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi, Iran’s minister of culture.
Several newspapers have claimed the plane had been ordered to fly despite warnings from its pilot, quoting colleagues aboard the doomed plane who had called in before take-off.
