Iran's largest airline carried infected travelers to Iraq, Lebanon and even China

An investigation reveals Iranian Mahan Air contributed to the spread of the coronavirus in the Middle East

photo_camera REUTERS/WOLFGANG RATTAY - An Airbus A340-300 from Iranian airline Mahan Air

The Iranian airline Mahan Air carried passengers infected with COVID-19 disease to Iraq and Lebanon and also between Iran and China, helping to spread the coronavirus throughout the Middle East region, despite bans on flights due to the current pandemic ravaging the world has already left hundreds of thousands dead and millions of cases diagnosed around the globe.  

Mahan Air, a private carrier under U.S. sanctions closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), continued to fly to China and nations such as Iraq and Lebanon for several weeks after Tehran officially banned flights from the country on January 31. 

Flight tracking data and open source footage showed how Iran’s Mahan Air airline continued to fly while government flight bans were implemented in the region and contributed to the spread of the coronavirus in the Middle East, an investigation by BBC News Arabic has found.
 

Un Airbus A310 de la aerolínea privada iraní Mahan Air se ve en el aeropuerto internacional de Saná

The investigation found that Mahan Air – Iran’s largest airline – ran hundreds of flights between Iran and several countries in the Middle East in the time period between late January and the end of March. And that the destination countries gave the Mahan Air flights permission to land despite having implemented their own bans on routine flights from Iran.

According to BBC News Arabic, the airline company concealed these operations. Although arrival and departure data from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport and Chinese airfields showed that the flights continued even into March, well into the midst of the global health crisis.  
 

Una vista de satélite del aeropuerto de Teherán

For instance, the Arab version of BBC News reports that on a flight on February 6, 70 Iranian students returned from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the origin and epicentre of the coronavirus, before travelling to Iraq on the same day. This information illustrates the serious risk taken and the recklessness of the COVID-19 health emergency.

Mahan Air officials indicated that all links from China had been terminated after a publication linked to the students' community denounced the above-mentioned trip of February 6. Nevertheless, there were 55 more flights from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen up to February 23, according to the commercial flight tracker Flightradar.24.

The BBC report found that the first cases of coronavirus in Iraq and Lebanon emerged from flights operated by Mahan Air. A remarkable fact considering Iran is one of the most affected countries by COVID-19 and it already has more than 6,300 deaths and around 100. 000 affected, despite the efforts led by Hassan Rohani's administration, which have not been sufficient to tackle the problem caused by the coronavirus. This has also weakened the country's finances as a result of the United States' sanctions against the ayatollahs' regime, which failed to comply with the nuclear agreement signed in 2015 to limit Iran's atomic programme following the withdrawal of Donald Trump's administration in 2018 after it denounced Iranian violations of the agreement's terms.
 

El presidente de Irán, Hasan Rohaní, al desembarcar de un avión

Airplanes arriving in Tehran from China also travelled within 24 hours to Barcelona, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Istanbul. Meanwhile, the cabin crew had expressed concern about the absence of appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and containment measures on the planes; this was easily verified given the shortage of medical and protective equipment within Iran's own territory during the coronavirus crisis, indicating that the Iranian state could hardly provide medical and protective assistance to the Asian giant. Allegations from the flight crew were silenced by the airline itself, despite Mahan Air sources confirmed to BBC News Arabic that dozens of cabin crew members showed previous COVID-19 symptoms. 

According to the investigation, while there were a few flights which carried aid from Iran to China and some were flights to repatriate Iranians, an additional 157 Mahan Air flights were operated between the two countries after February 5.
 

Miembros del Cuerpo de la Guardia Revolucionaria Islámica de Irán (IRGC)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had accused “Iran’s chief terror airline” Mahan Air of bringing the coronavirus into Iran through its flights to China.

The scandal revealed by the press reached such a point that, according to the reports, Mahan Air claimed that it was sending humanitarian aid to China and that none of the flights were passenger flights, something that was denied by the very evidence that showed that flights had been operated with passengers.  

Controversy with Mahan Air, Iran's largest airline, is also long overdue. In 2011, the United States pointed to the airline for its ties to terrorism due to an alleged link with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its international division, the Quds Forces. An armed force serving both the interests of the Iranian state and those of the Shiite side it defends in countries around the Middle East such as Iraq (with the support of the Popular Mobilization Forces militias), Lebanon (with the support of the Shiite armed group Hezbollah), Yemen (with the support given to the Shiite Huthi rebels in the framework of the Yemeni civil war) or Syria (with the aid given to the Shiite militia of Afghan origin of Liwa Fatemiyoun). In this case, Mahan Air was pointed out for arms smuggling related to Iranian representatives in areas of high tension in the Middle East, on behalf of the aforementioned Quds Force.
 

El comandante de las Fuerzas Quds del Cuerpo de la Guardia Revolucionaria Islámica, Ismail Qaani

Because of the sanctions, this airline is prohibited from accessing Saudi Arabian airspace (a major regional rival of Iran and the main representative of the Sunni branch of Islam, as opposed to the Shiite one of which the Iranian nation is the standard bearer), and cannot land at any airports in Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

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