Search for bodies of Iran’s elite troops killed in air crash
In the country's worst plane crash, the Russian-made Ilyushin crashed into a mountain on Wednesday evening amid bad weather en route from Zahedan, on the Pakistani border, to Kerman, about 500 miles southeast of Tehran.
All aboard 18 crew members and 284 passengers were members of the Revolutionary Guards, an elite group under the direct control of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The guards protect Iran's borders and defend ruling hardliners in this ultraconservative society.
A Revolutionary Guard commander in charge of relief operations, Ali Jafari, said more than 600 relief workers were searching the area to collect remains. He said bulldozers had created roads overnight to facilitate access to the site of the crash.
Two helicopters that tried to reach the crash site flew back to their base in Kerman because of bad weather, Jafari said. The weather was also was slowing down mountaineers and hampering efforts to retrieve remains, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Relief workers, who IRNA said earlier had confirmed there were no survivors, have set up more than a dozen tents to provide support for crash site search and recovery efforts.
At Sirach Mountains, the plane failed to clear the top of a peak by about 330 feet, Jafari said. Air traffic controllers at Kerman airport said the pilot radioed about bad weather and strong winds before losing contact. There was heavy snowfall in many parts of Iran on Tuesday.
Search teams found part of the debris, including the plane's wing.
A senior official in Zahedan said several of the victims were senior officers of the guard.
Wednesday's crash was the deadliest in Iranian history.
Meanwhile, a Pakistani military plane crashed into a mountainside in dense fog on Thursday in a remote region of northwestern Pakistan, killing all 17 people on board, including the chief of the air force.
The Fokker-27 turboprop lost contact with the control tower at the Kohat Air Base shortly before it was to land there, Pakistani officials said.
"This was an accident," Air Commodore Sarfraz Ahmad told reporters in the Islamabad, ruling out the possibility that the plane had been shot down on the edge of Pakistan's lawless tribal region. He said a board of inquiry will determine what caused the accident.
The crash killed air force chief Mushaf Ali Mir, 57, who was travelling from Islamabad to Kohat to conduct an annual inspection of the air base. He was accompanied by his wife, seven other air force officials and eight crew members when the plane went down about 16 miles from the base.
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