TEHRAN - Iran's new showpiece airport is to finally reopen Saturday after being dramatically shut down by the Revolutionary Guards a year ago over the involvement of a Turkish consortium, officials said Wednesday.
"All flights to and from the United Arab Emirates will be handled by Imam Khomeinei International Airport from April 30," said an official statement carried by the state news agency IRNA.
Airport authorities said that flights to and from the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait will be handled by the new complex as of May 9, but did not set a date for the handling of other international connections.
Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, one of the country's most powerful institutions, stormed the new airport on the day it opened in May 2004 to protest at the involvement of Turkish-Austrian consortium Tepe-Akfen-Vie (TAV).
The Revolutionary Guards argued that TAV also had dealings with arch-enemy Israel, and charged that its presence at the airport in the middle of the desert south of the capital was a threat to national security.
Earlier this month Transport Minister Mohammad Rahmati -- whose predecessor was impeached partly because of hardline objections to the contract -- suggested that when the new airport did reopen there would probably be no role for a foreign company.
The airport -- a project first launched three decades ago -- was built at a cost of 350 million dollars with a capacity of 2.5 million international and four million domestic passengers a year.
But it has been hit by a series of delays, damaging an effort to build a regional transport hub that will eventually be able to handle 40 million passengers a year.
Tehran's current international airport, Mehrabad, is situated close to the city centre, doubles up as a military airstrip and is badly overstretched.
The new airport is less convieniently located in the desert to the south of the badly congested capital.
04/27/2005 11:48 GMT