Iran recovers third black box of crashed plane

TEHRAN, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The Rescue Chief of Iran's Red Crescent Society said Thursday that Iran has recovered the third black box of the crashed plane, the local Mehr news agency reported.

Iranian soldiers gather at the crash site of the Caspian Airlines plane, which fell into farmland near the city of Qazvin, northwest of Tehran on July 15, 2009. (Xinhua/Liang Youchang)

"The rescuers found the third black box of the (crashed) plane four kilometers away from the crash site," the Rescue Chief Ahmad Esfandiari told Mehr, adding that "the rescuers have handed it over to the security officials of Civil Aviation Organization."

Earlier on Thursday, Iran announced that two black boxes of the passenger plane which crashed on Wednesday near the country's northwestern city of Gazvin were found.

The black boxes were heavily damaged and experts from Iran's Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) are trying to retrieve data, head of the Crisis Working Group of Iran's Road and Transportation Ministry Ahmad Majidi was quoted as saying by local satellite Press TV.

"If efforts to retrieve data from the boxes fail, they will be sent back to the country that has produced them so that they could be repaired in order to find the reason behind the crash," Majidi said.