Three killed in Iran helicopter crash

August 16, 2009 by Marcel van Leeuwen

TEHRAN: Three people on board were killed when an army training helicopter crashed on Sunday west of Tehran, a local official told state television.

‘Three people on board the helicopter died,’ governor of Shahriar, Mohammad Ali Erfan Manesh, said.

‘It was a training helicopter that belonged to the air force of the Islamic republic of Iran,’ he said without giving the cause of the accident.

The crash was previously reported to have occurred in the Tehran satellite residential area of Andisheh but Erfan Manesh said it actually took place near a village called Zarnan.

This is Iran’s third fatal air accident in the past week.

An Iranian police chopper crashed on Monday in the southern province of Kerman, killing three and leaving three other people aboard injured.

Two people died on Saturday when a training plane crashed due to a technical glitch.

Iran, which has been under years of US sanctions hampering its ability to buy American aircrafts and spare parts, has suffered a number of aviation disasters over the past decade.

The country’s civil and military fleet is made up of ancient aircraft in very poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance.

In July, an Iranian airliner en route to Armenia caught fire in mid-air and plunged into farmland, killing all 168 people on board in the country’s worst air disaster in years.

Also last month, an Iranian airliner overshot the runway in the city of Mashhad and slammed into a perimeter wall, killing 17 people.