Turkish tycoon’s daughter killed in Iran jet crash

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A private Turkish plane with 11 people on board, all women, crashed in Iran on Sunday while taking the daughter of a top businessman and her friends back home to Turkey from a celebration in the United Arab Emirates.

Turkish and Iranian officials said there were eight passengers and three crew aboard the plane which crashed in the south of Iran while flying from Sharjah to Istanbul.

Media reports in Turkey said the eight passengers were Mina Basaran, the daughter of leading Turkish businessman Huseyin Basaran, and her seven friends who had spent the past days in the UAE to celebrate her bachelorette party.

Mina Basaran with her father Turkish businessman Huseyin Basaran. /Photo via Mina Basaran's Instagram account

The crew, including the two pilots, were also all female, the reports said. The reports, carried by the Hurriyet daily and several Turkish TV channels, said the Bombardier Challenger 604 private plane belonged to Huseyin’s Basaran Holding company.

The Istanbul-based Basaran, a former deputy chairman of Trabzonspor football club, is active in the energy, construction and tourism sectors. It also owns hotels.

One of his companies is the top shareholder in Bahrain Middle East Bank BSC, a small investment bank. His construction projects include a series of luxury apartment blocks on Istanbul’s Asian side called “Mina Towers”, named after his daughter.

The last photo

Photo via Mina Basaran's Instagram account

Reports said that just a day before, the eight young women had posted a picture of themselves smiling and relaxing in Dubai on social media. Mina Basaran had also posted a picture on social media of her boarding the same Bombardier plane before it left Istanbul for the UAE, the reports added.

She had become engaged in October and the UAE trip was a traditional "farewell" to her friends before marriage. The 28-year-old had become a board member of her father's company already in 2013, Turkish reports said.

The last photo on Mina Barasan’s Instagram account showed her surrounded by seven other young women, all wearing robes and sunglasses. The post, tagged #minasbachelorette, said it was taken at the One and Only Royal Mirage luxury hotel in Dubai.

By late Sunday evening, just a few hours after news of the crash was released, there were more than 7,000 comments on the photo.

“The wreck of the jet and the bodies are found. They will be carried down from the mountain when the Sun comes up. My condolences to those who lost their loved ones,” the head of the Turkish Red Crescent, Kerem Kinik, said on Twitter, citing his Iranian sister organisation.

'Helicopter search'

This photo shows Mina Basaran walking toward her private jet. /Photo via Mina Basaran's Instagram account

Iranian media said the plane went down in remote mountains in the snow-capped Zagros range during bad weather. The plane had left from the emirate of Sharjah and crashed near the city of Shahr-e Kord, about 400 kilometers south of Tehran, Iranian state television reported.

Sharjah Civil Aviation Department said in a statement that the plane "did not apply for maintenance procedures while on the ground at the airport."

The plane took off at 17:16 local time (13:16 GMT) and disappeared from the radar screen at 15:30 GMT, said the statement carried by the state WAM news agency. It said the eight passengers on board were six Turks and two Spaniards. It did not give the nationality of the three crew members.

Reza Jafarzadeh, head of the Iran Civil Aviation Organisation, confirmed the plane had eight passengers and three crew members on board. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.

Hurriyet said the plane had two female pilots and a crew member, meaning all those on board are women. One formerly flew Turkish army fighter jets as one of Turkey's first female pilots, it said. The other had worked in the past for flag carrier Turkish Airlines.

Tasnim news agency quoted an ICAO official as saying: "The plane is on fire. After the pilot asked to lower altitude, it disappeared from the radar."

A video grab from a Turkish TV channel shows the location on a map, where a Turkish private jet flying from Dubai to Istanbul with 11 people on board crashed by hitting the Zagros Mountains near southwestern Shahr-e Kord province of Iran, on March 11, 2018. /VCG Photo

Iranian media reported that rescuers had been dispatched by land to the crash site, which is located in a relatively isolated area of Helen's Mountain - a protected area in the Zagros range. Some reports said the plane went down during heavy rain.

The head of Iran's Red Crescent, Morteza Salimi, told state television that two helicopters would fly to the area on Monday morning "to search for the plane's debris and bodies" – indicating there could be no survivors.

The Zagros range was the scene of another aviation tragedy in February, when an ATR-72 twin engine passenger plane of Iran's Aseman Airlines crashed there killing all 66 people on board. The plane had disappeared from radar after taking off from Tehran on a domestic flight as a snowstorm battered the mountains.

Rescue teams had to battle bad weather for days before they were able to recover the black boxes of that aircraft and had to interrupt their operation several times because of bad weather. They are still working on bringing the remains of those killed down the valley from the crash site which lies at a height of about 4,000 metres (13,000 feet).

[Cover photo via Mina Basaran's Instagram account]

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Source(s): Reuters