TWENTY-NINE people were killed yesterday when an Iranian airliner caught fire after crash-landing in the northeastern city of Mashhad, the head of civil aviation said.

Nurollah Rezai Niaraki told state television that 29 bodies had been recovered from the Russian-made Tupolev 154, 43 people were injured and the rest of the 148 passengers survived unhurt.

The aircraft — similar in size and structure to a Boeing 727 — has a particularly unfortunate record. Less than two weeks ago a Tupolev 154 crashed in eastern Ukraine with the loss of all 170 people on board.

State television had earlier said that the death toll on the flight to Mashhad, 620 miles northeast of Tehran, from the southern port city of Bandar Abbas was at least 80.

Many passengers were likely to have been pilgrims. Mashhad, literally “the place of martyrdom”, is home to the tomb of Imam Reza, the eighth Shia imam, and attracts millions of pilgrims every year.

Television pictures showed the aircraft, which is owned by the Iran Airtours carrier, lying flat without its wheels on the outskirts of the airport, with a large hole in the fuselage.

“As the plane was landing one of its tyres burst, forcing it to swerve off the runway before hitting nearby barriers and bursting into flames,” an airport official in Mashhad said.

Rescue workers used hoses to douse the flames, turning the ground around into a quagmire of mud and water. Several corpses were on the ground beside the aircraft, swathed in blankets.

An Iranian civil aviation official said that the pilot did not ask for an emergency landing before the accident.

Mr Niaraki said that, because all the flight crew had survived, it should be possible to reach a full understanding of what had caused the crash.

The incident was the latest tragedy to hit the Iranian aviation industry, whose fleet is made up largely of Soviet or old Western aircraft because of the sanctions imposed by the United States after the Islamic revolution in 1979.

More than 1,460 people have died in 17 air disasters in the past 25 years, excluding the accident yesterday, according to figures published in the Iranian media.

In December, a group of parliamentarians sought the dismissal of the defence minister when an ageing American-made military aircraft crashed into an apartment block shortly after taking off from Mehrabad airport in Tehran. Ninety-four people died on board and at least 22 more were killed on the ground.

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