Wreckage in flames after airliner bound for Armenia crashes near Qazvin in north-west Iran

All 168 people on board a flight from Tehran to Armenia are feared dead after the plane crashed today in a rural area of north-west Iran.

Shortly after take-off flight 7908, operated by Iran’s Caspian airlines, came down in farmland near the city of Qazvin.

“It is highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed,” Hossein Bahzadpour, the Qazvin emergency services director, told the IRNA news agency.

“It’s a major disaster with pieces of aircraft spread over an area of 200 sq m,” a fire brigade official told state television. “There was an explosion which left an indentation 10 metres deep in the ground. There was nothing we could do. We tried to put out the fire as best we could.”

The Fars news agency quoted a senior provincial official, Sirous Saberi, as saying the aeroplane had technical problems and tried to do an emergency landing.

“Unfortunately the plane caught fire in the air and it crashed … different small parts of this plane can be seen on the ground,” Reuters reported, quoting Fars.

Caspian airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993. The Russian-built Tupolev plane had been on its way to the Armenian capital, Yerevan. It came down this morning near the village of Jannatabad in Qazvin province, about 75 miles north-west of Tehran, 16 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport.

The deputy chairman of Armenia’s civil aviation authority, Arsen Pogosian, told reporters in Yerevan there were 154 passengers and 15 crew members on board. Most are thought to be Iranians.

Television footage showed a smouldering crater strewn with mangled wreckage, with a large piece of wing lying in farmland. Most of the wreckage appeared to be in small pieces and included clothes, shoes and identity papers.

There were differing eyewitness accounts of what happened. One said: “I was about 300 metres away. The plane fell from the sky and exploded on impact.” But another told the ISNA news agency that the plane’s tail burst into flames and the plane circled in the air as if looking for a place to land before it crashed.

Serob Karapetian, the chief of Yerevan airport’s aviation security service, said the plane may have attempted an emergency landing, but reports that it caught fire in the air were “only one version”.

Bodies had been gathered from the crater, Press TV said. Those on board included eight members of Iran’s national youth judo team and three coaches. They were planning to train with the Armenian judo team before attending competitions in Hungary. Six Armenian citizens and two Georgian citizens were on the flight, and the rest were likely to be Iranians, Pogosian said.

At Yerevan airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and her sister’s two sons, who were due on the flight. “What will I do without them?” she said, weeping, before she collapsed to the floor.

Iran has frequent plane crashes, which it blames on US sanctions that prevent it from getting spare parts for aging aircraft. But Caspian airlines uses Russian-made planes whose maintenance would be less affected by American sanctions.

In February 2006, a Russian-made Tupolev TU-154 operated by Iran Airtour crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board. Airtour is affiliated with Iran’s national carrier, Iran Air.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has expressed his condolences to the victims’ families and called for an urgent inquiry.