Iran says plane caught fire before crash

Kyiv - An initial report by Iran's civil aviation organisation said the plane had experienced an unspecified technical problem.

Ukraine outlined four potential scenarios on Thursday to explain the deadly crash of one of its airliners in Iran, including a missile strike and terrorism, as Iranian investigators said the plane was on fire before it fell to the ground.
Kyiv said its investigators wanted to search the site of Wednesday's crash southwest of Tehran for possible debris of a Russian-made missile used by Iran's military. An initial report by Iran's civil aviation organisation said the plane had experienced an unspecified technical problem.
The Ukrainian International Airlines Boeing 737-800, flying to Kyiv and carrying mostly Iranians and Iranian-Canadians, crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport, killing all 176 people on board.
The Iranian report cited witnesses on the ground and in a passing aircraft flying at high altitude as saying the plane was on fire while still aloft.
It said the three-year-old airliner, which had its last scheduled maintenance on Monday, encountered a technical problem shortly after take-off and started to head towards a nearby airport before it crashed. The report said there was no radio communication from the pilot and that the aircraft disappeared from radar at 8,000 feet.
It is so far unclear if any technical issue could be related to a maintenance fault or defective part.
The disaster puts a renewed spotlight on Boeing, which faces a safety crisis over a different type of 737, though the plane that crashed in Iran does not have the feature thought to have caused crashes of the grounded 737 MAX. A Canadian security source said there was evidence one of the engines had overheated.
The initial assessment of Western intelligence agencies was that the plane had suffered a technical malfunction and had not been brought down by a missile, five security sources - three Americans, one European and the Canadian - who asked not to be named, said.
Ukraine Security Council Secretary Oleksiy Danylov said the country's investigators wanted to search for possible Russian missile debris after seeing information on the internet.
He referred to an unverified image circulated on Iranian social media purportedly showing the debris of a Russian-made Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile of the kind used by the Iranian military.
Ukrainian investigators into the crash include experts who participated in the investigation into the 2014 shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, Danylov said.
The Malaysian airliner was shot down on July 17, 2014, over territory held by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine as it was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board.
Ukraine is looking at various possible causes, including a missile attack, a collision, an engine explosion or terrorism.

• MENA