Suspicious package forces return of Iranian plane

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TEHRAN, IRAN - An Iranian airliner was forced to return to a regional airport minutes after takeoff because of the discovery of a suspicious package on board, the official news agency reported Sunday.

The contents of the package were being investigated, said the chief of the air guards, Mohammad Hasan Kazemi, according to the IRNA news agency.

Earlier Sunday, the news agency had said that air guards defused a threat to the flight, a phrase normally used to refer to a hijacking. Later, IRNA clarified that the incident involved a suspicious package.

The plane, carrying 140 passengers, returned to an airport in the southwestern city of Ahvaz 15 minutes after takeoff Saturday after a passenger reported a suspicious package. The plane belongs to one of Iran’s commercial airlines, Kish Air.

Kazemi called the incident a “sabotage operation” without elaborating. The flight was from Ahvaz to the capital, Tehran, about 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the northeast.

As Iran prepares for its June 12 presidential election, there have been a number of violent incidents, including a bombing Thursday at a mosque in another southern Iranian city, Zahedan, that killed 25 people and wounded 80. A day later, a shooting at President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s campaign office in the same city injured three people.

Kazemi did not reject the possibility of a link between those two incidents and the suspicious package on the airliner and said that “enemies” were trying to create a sense of hopelessness among Iranians before the election.

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