All 66 people on board a passenger plane that crashed Sunday in a mountainous region of southern Iran are presumed dead, the airline said.
The Aseman Airlines plane was flying from Tehran to the southwestern city of Yasuj when it disappeared 50 minutes into the flight, according to a post on the airline’s Instagram account.
The flight, which departed at 7:55 a.m. local time (11.25 p.m. ET Saturday), crashed in Kohangan village, 120 kilometers (74 miles) from Semirom town, authorities told Iran’s Fars News Agency .
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani expressed their condolences to the victims and their families, ordering officials to spare no efforts in their rescue operation, the state-run Islamic News Agency (IRNA) reported.
The ATR aircraft, a twin-engine turboprop typically used for short-distance regional flights, hit the Dena Mountains, the report said.
The 66 people on board included 60 passengers, two flight attendants, two pilots and two members of security forces.
Aseman Airlines posted an image of the plane involved in the crash on its Instagram account.
Twenty rescue teams have been dispatched to the crash site. One helicopter earlier forced to turn back due to bad weather.
“This is a snow-covered mountainous area, much like the Rockies in America or the European Alps,” CNN Senior International Correspondent Sam Kiley said. “Any rescue operation will depend entirely on the weather.”
Several flights from Tehran were disrupted Sunday due to bad weather, according to IRNA.
And at Abadan International Airport in southwestern Iran, two domestic flights were canceled due to pollution, which reduced visibility range to two meters, IRNA added.
