"High speed" causes plane crash in northeast Iran

TEHRAN, July 26 (Xinhua) -- Head of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization, Mohammad Ali Ilkhani, said that "high speed" was the cause of the plane crash in northeastern Iran on Friday, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.

Upon technical investigations and reading the CVR (Black box) of the Russian-made Ilyushin Il-62 plane, it was found that "high speed" was the cause of incident, Ilkhani said Saturday evening according to the report.

"The investigation shows there was a kind of disorder in the cockpit and the pilot had no full concentration to control the plane," he said, adding that the plane should have had a speed between 145 and 165 miles during landing, while the investigation says its speed was 197 miles that moment.

The plane, which was traveling from Tehran to Mashhad with 153 passengers on board, caught fire and skidded into walls near the runway during its landing in Mashhad at 18:10 local time (1340 GMT)Friday.

Thirteen of the 16 people killed in the plane incident were crew members and the other three were Iranian passengers.

Nine of the dead crew were from Kazakhstan and the other four were Iranians.

Around 30 people out of the 153 people on board were injured.

It was the second deadly air accident involving an Iranian airliner within 10 days. On July 15, a Caspian Airlines plane crashed near the northwestern city of Qazvin, killing all 168 people on board.

The Russian-made Tupolev passenger plane had been traveling from Tehran to the Armenian capital of Yerevan.

The cause of the disaster was not clear so far, but the officials have attributed the incident to the technical problems of the Caspian Airlines plane.

In the past, Iran's airlines have suffered a number of flight disasters, both civil and military use.

Experts believe that the U.S.-imposed sanctions against Iran, which prevented its allies from selling aircraft or aircraft parts to the country, have undermined safety standards within Iran's civil and military aviation fleet and are increasing the likelihood of more major air disasters.