Hen party jet crash
Bride-to-be and seven friends killed on way back from celebration
A TURKISH heiress and seven friends died when their private jet crashed on the way home from a luxury hen party in Dubai.
Bride-to-be Mina Basaran, 28, who had been due to get married next month, had whisked away her friends for a holiday on a jet believed to be owned by her father. All eight women and three flight crew died on Sunday when the Bombardier Challenger 604 went down in a mountain range in south-west Iran after the engine reportedly caught fire mid-flight.
Several of the party guests worked in fashion, as jewellery or clothes designers, and were all part of the upper echelons of Istanbul society.
Ms Basaran had been sharing glimpses of the high-class hen party with her 86,000 followers on Instagram, with one image at the start of the trip showing the group posing with three female crew members, and another of her holding heart-shaped balloons and a bouquet of flowers.
The day before she died, she had posted a photograph from a hotel in Dubai of herself surrounded by her friends in matching pink robes. The last videos showed the group enjoying a concert by pop star Rita Ora at a nightclub.
It is thought that the jet was owned by the company run by Ms Basaran’s father, tycoon Huseyin Basaran. Flight records show that just over an hour after the jet took off from Sharjah International Airport in the United Arab Emirates, it rapidly gained altitude and then dropped suddenly.
Officials have recovered the plane’s black box data recorder from the wreckage, which will be used by investigators trying to piece together what happened.
Due to get married next month