A passenger plane heading from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan crashed near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, state television said. The Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour tells the IRNA news agency that the plane was completely destroyed and shattered to pieces, and the wreckage was in flames. "It is highly likely that all the passengers on the flight were killed," Bahzadpour said. Iranian Civil Aviation Organization spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh had told state television that 153 passengers and 15 crewmembers were on the Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet that had been headed from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan. A Caspian Airlines representative told AP in Yerevan that most of the passengers were Armenians, and that some Georgian citizen and other nationalities were on board. Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in 1993. Iran has frequent plane crashes, which it blames on U.S. sanctions on the country that prevent it from getting spare parts for aging airplanes. Caspian Airlines, however, uses Russian-made aircraft whose maintenance would be less impaired by American sanctions