Iranian Plane Crashes In UAE killing All But 2 Passengers

"Officials said there were about 40 passengers on the plane and that one child and another passenger survived but they are in critical condition," the news bulletin presenter said over pictures of smoldering wreckage of the Kish Airlines plane, Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Several dead bodies were shown in dramatic footage of the burning fuselage. One crumpled body lay several yards from the wreck, another lay broken amid smashed seats.

A long line of dead bodies were displayed covered by red blankets.

Rescue workers wearing surgical masks over their mouths battled through thick black smoke as firemen doused the wreckage with water hoses.

"A passenger plane belonging to Kish Airlines came down between Ajman and Sharjah," the television said.

The television made no mention of the crew.

"The plane was coming in to land," an airport security official at Sharjah international told AFP.

The flight had come from the Iranian Gulf island of Kish when it went down in an open area in the United Arab Emirates.

The type of aircraft was not immediately clear. According to its website Kish Airlines operates the Dutch-built Fokker 50 turboprop, which has a capacity of up to50 , and the larger three-jet Tupolev154 M of Soviet origin.

On September6 , one of the airline’s Tupolevs crashed after hitting a tree when it tried to land in heavy fog at Minsk, Belarus, but none of the nearly 40 people aboard were injured, according to airport authorities at the time.

Kish Airlines operates daily flights around the Gulf to the island and is used particularly by Iranian tourists and Asian workers who have to leave the UAE briefly to obtain new visas.

Kish, which contains a duty-free zone and is considered more liberal than the rest of Iran, lies 18 kilometers ( 11miles) off the southern Iranian coast and 200 kilometers ( 120miles) from Dubai.