TEHRAN, Iran — A plane carrying 270 passengers, most military personnel, crashed in southern Iran on Wednesday, state-run Tehran television reported.
The plane was on a domestic route from Zahedan, on the Pakistan border, to Kerman, about 500 miles southeast of Tehran. It crashed about 50 miles from its destination, near the city of Shahdad.
The television report said the plane lost contact with the control tower at 5:30 p.m. local time.
The report said the plane's 270 passengers were members of the elite Revolutionary Guards.
An anonymous official told Tehran television that the forces had visited the impoverished Sistan-Baluchestan province, of which Zahedan is the capital, for an "important duty." The military corps is seen as a defender of Iran's Islamic regime.
The report said the plane was a Russian-made Antonov airliner. There were no more details available on the crash.
Wednesday's crash was the latest in a string of air disasters in Iran involving mostly Russian-built airliners.
A Ukrainian An-140 aircraft flew into a mountainside Dec. 23, 2002, while preparing to land at an airport near the central city of Isfahan, killing all the estimated 46 scientists aboard.
In February 2002, the Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154 airliner, carrying 119 people, smashed into snow-covered mountains not far from its destination of Khorramabad, 230 miles southwest of Tehran.
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