Iran Plane Catches Fire On Runway

An airliner carrying 157 passengers skidded off a runway into a river at Tehran's Mehrabad airport on Wednesday, killing a child, state-run television reported. Numbers of dead and injured are unclear, but several passengers are reported injured.

Television reports said the landing gear of the Saha Airlines Boeing 707 failed to open and the plane caught fire after making a hard landing, its nose and wing slamming into the runway.

State TV quoted the airline's managing director, identified only by his last name Nikokar, saying a child was killed. A woman passenger told the broadcaster that her son was missing.

"Only one person has been killed and a number of passengers have been injured," television quoted Nikokar as saying.

Initially, government television said 50 people were killed, then changed its report to say scores were dead. It later retracted both claims and said only that passengers were confirmed injured.

TV said part of the plane's fuselage plunged into a river but passengers were able to jump out of the craft.

The injured, many of whom suffered broken bones, have been taken to Tehran hospitals for treatment, the television said.

The plane, carrying 157 passengers, eight of them children, had just arrived from the tourist island of Kish in the Persian Gulf at 10:15 p.m.

Saha Airline Services is owned by the Iranian military but also operates civilian flights. It was not immediately known whether military personnel were on board.

In 2003, Iran suffered its worst-ever air disaster when a Russian-made Ilyushin military plane crashed in a mountainous area killing 302 Iranian soldiers. The plane was on route from to Kerman, about 500 miles southeast of Tehran.

The toll in the 2003 crash surpassed the 290 killed on July 3, 1988, when an Iran Air A300 Airbus was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes. The U.S. military said it misidentified the plane as an Iranian fighter, an account disputed by Iran.