A Ukrainian passenger plane carrying 180 passengers and crew has crashed near Tehran.
The airliner, said to be a Boeing 737, went down near Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport, according to Iranian State TV.
An Iran affairs correspondent for the BBC, reported the incident on Tuesday night and said Iranian Fars News Agency reported the plane suffered technical problems then went down minutes after take-off in Tehran.
The local media reported that there were details on casualties.
The report came after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was accused of threatening America with another Lockerbie after he tweeted a veiled reference to the 1988 bombing that killed 270 people.
Rouhani tweeted that America should ‘never threaten Iran’ after warning the US should ‘remember the number 290’ in reference to an incident when the US Navy accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf in July 1988, killing 290.
Some Middle East experts have taken this as a veiled reference to the Lockerbie terrorist attack, which saw a bomb destroy Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988 killing 270 – months after the downing of Iranian flight 655.
Libya has always been blamed for the Lockerbie bombing, and one of their intelligence agents was jailed in Scotland for the terror attack.
But Western spies believe Tehran played a role in the attack and executed it in revenge for the downing of the Iranian passenger jet – now Rouhani’s sinister return to the episode and threatening of consequences has fueled those suspicions.
