Plane crash in Iran kills 39

A passenger plane crashed on the outskirts of Iran's capital Tehran on Sunday morning, killing 39 passengers and injuring nine others, state IRIB TV reported.
The Antonov-140 (also Iran-140) of local Sepahan airlines, bound for Iran's eastern Tabas city, crashed after taking off from Tehran Mehrabad Airport at 9:45 a.m. local time (0515 GMT), official IRNA news agency said.
Earlier, local media reported that all 48 people on board, including 40 passengers and eight crew members, had been killed after the plane crashed in the residential area of Azadi town, just 5 km to the west of Tehran.
Failure in one of the plane's engines caused the plane to crash on the northern side of Tehran-Karaj highway, semi-official Fars news agency quoted Mohammad Ilkhani, the head of Iran Airports Company, as saying.
In February 2009, an Antonov-140 also crashed in Iran's central Isfahan province while the crew were on a training flight, leaving five pilots killed.
"No flight permission should have been issued to this plane," the Iranian lawmaker Mehrdad Lahouti said in a parliament meeting on Sunday, according to semi-official ISNA news agency.
"The first plane of this type had been crashed in Isfahan during a training flight" several years ago, Lahouti said, adding that the Iranian lawmakers, who had visited the construction process of this plane for two times, had expressed their concerns in this regard.
On Sunday, the Iranian Majlis (parliament) tasked its Construction Commission with the necessary measures to investigate the plane crash as the Ministry of Road and Urban Development assigned its own special committee to probe into the crash, said Tasnim news agency.
Iran has seen several air disasters involving both civil and military use aircraft in recent years.
In the latest incident in January 2011, an air crash near the airport of the northwestern city of Urmia killed 77 people, including four foreigners.