All 11 people aboard were confirmed dead when an Iranian military aircraft crashed on Monday morning in northwestern Iran, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Previous reports put the death toll at 13 when a small Falcon jet belonging to Iran's elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) went down at 9:45 AM local time (06:15 GMT) in Aidinlou village near Orumiyeh, the capital of West Azarbaijan province bordering Turkey.
Yadollah Rabiei, deputy chief of the Public Relations Department of IRGC, was quoted as saying that all 11 on board were killed in the accident, including Ahmad Kazemi, commander of the ground forces of the IRGC, his deputy Saeed Soleymani and several other high-ranking officers.
Massoud Jazayeri, spokesman of the IRGC, blamed bad weather and dilapidated engines for the crash.
"The plane crashed in foggy weather after its engines broke down...the pilot managed to land the plane on a road but bad weather prevented him making a full stop, leading to the crash,"Jazayeri told IRNA.
Earlier, the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted a parliament official as saying that the pilot reported engine malfunction before the crash.
"Before the crash of the Falcon airplane, the pilot had announced emergency situation citing the failure of the two engines," Chairman of the Majlis (Parliament) defense subcommittee Reza Talayee Nik said.
This was the second air disaster in two months in Iran.
An Iranian C-130 transport aircraft crashed on Dec. 6 last year in a residential area in Tehran shortly after take-off, killing atotal of 108 both on board and on the ground.
Iran has witnessed high rate of air crash due to the lack of spare parts and maintenance of aircraft, especially US-made planes, as a result of US economic sanctions.
(Xinhua News Agency January 10, 2006)
