170 feared dead in Iranian plane crash

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying nearly 170 people crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces. State television said all on board were killed.

The plane's tail burst into flames in the air and the aircraft circled as if looking for a place to land before it crashed, an unidentified witness told the semi-official ISNA news agency.

The impact gouged a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered with smoking wreckage and body parts, according to photos from the scene. Footage aired on state TV showed a large chunk of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds, and emergency workers and witnesses picked around the shredded metal for bodies and flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.

The Caspian Airlines Tupolev jet had taken off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport Wednesday and was headed to the Armenian capital Yerevan. It crashed about 16 minutes after takeoff near the village of Jannat Abad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jaafarzadeh told state media.