Turkish private jet crashes in Iran

TEHRAN, Iran — A Turkish private jet flying from the United Arab Emirates to Istanbul with at least 11 people on board crashed Sunday night in a mountainous region of Iran during a heavy rain, authorities said. There was no immediate report of casualties.

Iranian state television quoted Mojtaba Khaledi, the spokesman of the country’s emergency management organization, as saying the plane hit a mountain in Shahr-e Kord and burst into flames.

Shahr-e Kord is about 230 miles south of the capital, Tehran. The state-run IRNA news agency and state television said rescuers were trying to reach the scene, high up in the Zagros Mountains.

Villagers near the crash say they saw flames coming from the plane’s engine before the crash, according to a report by Iran’s state-run judiciary news agency Mizan.

The semi-official Fars news agency said the plane took off from Sharjah International Airport on its way to Istanbul. A private company that handles public relations for the Sharjah airfield, the home of low-cost airline Air Arabia, declined to immediately comment. Sharjah is a neighboring emirate of Dubai.

Turkey’s private Dogan News Agency identified the plane as a Bombardier CL604, tail number TC-TRB. Turkey’s Transport Ministry said the plane belongs to a company named Basaran Holding, which The Associated Press could not immediately reach.

Mina Basaran, a 28-year-old woman who is part of Basaran Holding’s board of managers and is in line to run the business, posted photographs on Instagram of what appeared to be her bachelorette party in Dubai. Among those photographs was an image of the crashed plane posted three days ago.

The last videos posted to her account showed her and friends enjoying a concert by the British pop star Rita Ora at a popular Dubai nightclub. 

Sunday’s crash comes after an Iranian ATR-72, a twin-engine turboprop used for short-distance regional flying, crashed in southern Iran, killing all 65 people on board in February.