A Turkish private plane carrying eleven people crashed in Iran on Sunday as he was taking the daughter of a prominent businessman and his friends back to Turkey after partying in the United Arab Emirates, according to Turkish media reports.
Eight passengers and three crew members were on board the aircraft traveling from Sharjah to Istanbul and crashed into a remote mountainous region in southern Iran, Turkish and Iranian officials said.
Media in Turkey said the passengers were Mina Basaran, the daughter of a prominent Turkish businessman, Huseyin Basaran, and her seven friends. They had gone to celebrate in the UAE to “bury Mina Basaran’s maiden life” before her marriage. She got engaged in October.
The causes of the accident are not yet known and an Iranian official suggested that there was little chance of finding survivors.
According to the Hurriyet daily and several Turkish television channels, the Bombardier Canadian Challenger 604 belonged to the Basaran Holding Company owned by Mina Basaran’s father.
The Istanbul-based company is active in the energy, construction and tourism sectors.
The eight young women had posted on social networks a picture of them smiling and relaxing in Dubai. Mina Basaran had also published a photo of her boarding the plane before leaving Istanbul for the Emirates, according to news reports in Turkey.
Aged 28, the young woman sat on the board of directors of her father’s company, according to the same source.
Mina Başaran shared this photo from her social media account 1 day before the plane crash … The following names are included in the photo: Mina Başaran, Zeynep Coşkun, Ayşe And, Burcu Urfalı, Aslı İzmirli, Liana Hananel, Jasmin Baruh and Sinem Akay.
Mountainous area
In Iran, state television reported that the plane crashed in a mountainous area of Chahar Mahall – Bakhtiari province, more than 400 km south of Tehran.
According to the official Iranian news agency Irna, the crash took place at 18:45 local time.
The plane disappeared from the radar after “the pilot asked to be able to lower altitude,” said an official of the Organization of Civil Aviation of Iran (OPCW).
In a statement, the civil aviation department in Sharjah said the plane “did not ask to go through maintenance at the airport.”
According to the daily Hurriyet, the pilot was a former fighter pilot of the Turkish army.
For his part, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent relief operation, Morteza Salimi, said on television that “two helicopters” would be sent Monday “as soon as possible to search for the wreckage of the plane and the bodies”, suggesting that there were no survivors.
According to Iranian media, rescue teams were sent by land but the aircraft fell into a relatively isolated area in the Mount Helen (protected natural area) area in the Zagros range.
They said the plane crashed in a snow-covered area.
The Zagros Mountains were the scene of another air disaster on 18 February. An aircraft of the Iranian company Aseman crashed, killing 66 people on board. But the difficulties of access to the wreck are such that the operations of descent of the bodies towards the valley are still in progress.