Plane crash in central Iran kills 46

A passenger plane crashed in central Iran yesterday on a flight from Turkey, killing 46 people, mostly from Ukraine.

The aircraft went down close to the city of Isfahan, its intended destination, about 250 miles south of Tehran, while attempting to make a routine landing at 7.30pm (14.00GMT), state-run Iranian television said.

Al-Jazeera satellite station, based in Qatar, quoted sources in Tehran as saying everyone on board had been killed.

Mykola Melnikov, a duty office at the Ukrainian Emergency Situations Ministry, said the airliner appeared to be an An-140 that had taken off from Kharkiv, in Ukraine, with a delegation of aerospace officials from the Kharkiv aircraft plant – which built the plane in which they were flying. Al-Jazeera said the plane had stopped off in Turkey.

An aircraft manufacturing official said the plane lost contact with Isfahan airport's control tower. Why it crashed was not immediately clear. (AP)